Photo booth a biography book

Winding through the book like a helix around Fitzgerald’s own story is a history of photobooths.  Fitzgerald describes a series of photographic machines that allowed people with no training to make pictures of themselves, leading up to Anatol Josephewitz’s Photomaton.  The Photomaton, which would come to dominate the industry, would take 8 pictures on a strip for 25 cents; people lined up down Broadway to use it.  Josephewitz’s story is extraordinary: he left Siberia at fifteen for Berlin, travelling to New York and back to Europe and eventually fleeing revolutionary Russia through China to arrive in San Francisco and then back to New York.  Through it all he developed prototypes and plans for an “automatic photo-making machine.”

These stories are told through illustration and prose, which feels surprisingly appropriate in this book that is at least partly about photography.

 There’s a wonderfully uncanny feeling in reading a hist