Photo Booths in Boston

The Photo Booth Scene in Boston

Boston has 14 verified analog photo booths — a modest number for a city with the density of student and creative populations that Boston maintains. The machines are concentrated in the neighborhoods where Boston's younger and more creative populations live: Allston's rock-and-bar scene along Harvard Avenue, Somerville's Davis Square corridor, Cambridge's Harvard Square, and Jamaica Plain's (JP) emerging creative corridor on Centre Street. Allston is the heart of Boston's booth culture — the student-heavy neighborhood has bars and music venues on Harvard and Brighton Avenues that have maintained analog machines through decades of tenant turnover, producing strips that document Boston's perpetual youth. The booths at Allston's dive bars have seen thousands of college students, band members, and lifers pass through their curtains. Davis Square in Somerville, anchored by its historic theater and surrounding bar scene, has a handful of machines in the bars along the square and the neighboring blocks. Harvard Square's booths serve a different function — they're in the bars and cafes that have been part of Cambridge intellectual life for generations, and the strips show it. JP — Boston's most genuinely diverse neighborhood — has seen booth installations grow as Centre Street's bar and restaurant scene has matured. What ties Boston's booth scene together is its relationship to the academic calendar: booths see intense use during the school year and quiet down in the summer when the student population scatters.