JTF (just the facts): Co-published in 2024 by Perimeter Editions (here) and the Centre for Contemporary Photography (here). Softcover (22 x 14.7 cm), 256 pages, with approximately 200 black-and-white and color photographs. Includes texts by Patrick Pound, Catlin Langford, and Daniel Boetker-Smith, along with an interview with the artist, Jessie Norman, and Christopher Sutherland. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Alan Adler bought his first photobooth in the early 1970s, when he was about 40 years old. Since then, for over fifty years now, Adler has maintained a string of photobooths across Melbourne. Twice a week, he replaces the paper and the chemicals, collects the coins, and to ensure the flash, focus, and print quality are still functioning correctly, he also takes a quick image of himself. His regular self-portrait routine has had him dubbed the “most photographed man in Australia”, and his photobooths have become part of the cultural lexicon of Melbourne, having taken over one million pictures. Adler, now in his mid 90s, is possibly the longest-serving photobooth technician in the world.
This year Melbourne-based Perimeter Editions and the Centre for Contemporary Photography co-published a book about Adler, released ahead of a major exhibition scheduled for 2025. The book serves as a record of Adler’s passion and his unique collection of images, while a number of excellent essays offer more insights into the history and conceptualization of photobooth photography.
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is a softcover book, and generally feels like a mix between a photobook and conventional book. The cover features rows of color portraits of Adler, just like photobooth strips, and the inside flap shows a photobooth diagram. An essay by the vernacular photography collector Patrick Pound titled “Photography without photographers” opens the book, offering a framing for the book’s subject matter. It is followed by a full spread photo of Adler in his signature glasses and his eyes closed. All the photographs are arranged in a chronological order, and the very first one is marked with 1970s in the left upper corner. The visual flow of the book is dynamic and exciting, going from full spreads to sets of photo strips in various combinations. Adler’s comedic and goofy expressions, along with his shifting fashions and the unavoidable signs of aging, offer a heartfelt story.
Pound notes that the photobooth is at “once a private escape and a public convenience”, with the sitter ostensibly in control, but this control is a “matter of timing, chance, and luck.” Overall, the edit of the photobook feels particularly fresh and energetic, its visual narrative joyful, exciting, and also altogether familiar, as most of us have posed in a photobooth at one time or another. Moving between full spread images to pages filled with tiny portraits of Adler, the flow definitely doesn’t feel boring, even though the subject remains the same in all of the pictures, and Adler’s various comedic expressions add a healthy sense of humor. Some shots have stains, color distortions, and folding marks signaling their test nature and also adding sense of a physical character and passing time.
In another essay, Catlin Langford offers a look at photobooth history, noting that the origins of the photobooth can be traced back to the 1850s, “with the uncredited invention of the ferrotype vending machine, which dispatched photographic plates at the insertion of a coin”. Anatol Marco Josepho is credited as the inventor of the modern photobooth, opening the first studio in New York in 1925, starting the modern photobooth era.
The middle section of the book contains color photographs, all printed full bleed and documenting Adler visiting photobooths and taking test shots. It adds another layer to the story. It is followed by a discussion between Adler, Jessie Norman, and Christopher Sutherland, offering more insights into Adler’s work. “It is pictures of people having a good time”, he says at one point about photobooth strips.
The very last photo is from the 2010s, crossing over the gutter, Adler’s face takes up the entire frame. It is followed by an essay by Daniel Boetker-Smith titled “Some things are precious because they don’t last long”. As a book, Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is at once mundane, fun, entertaining, and educational. Its success lies in its clever integration of joyful photographs and a compelling story that connects to the larger history of the medium, with a layer of nostalgia to which most of us can relate.
Collector’s POV: Since the photographs included in this photobook are part of Adler’s personal and professional archive, there do not appear to be any prints available for sale to collectors or institutions; perhaps this will change when the exhibition opens next year.
