Photo Booths in Paris

The Photo Booth Scene in Paris

Paris has a photo booth lineage that stretches back to the 1920s, when the first photomaton machines appeared in the city's train stations and department stores. France was an early adopter of automated photography — the country's first photomaton booths were installed by a Belgian company in 1928, decades before the format became popular in the United States. Today, Paris maintains a scattered but significant network of analog photo booths, concentrated in the neighborhoods where French cultural life has always happened: the narrow streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the bar-lined boulevards of the 11th arrondissement, the winding passageways of Montmartre. The machines here reflect French photographic culture — serious, aesthetic, often black-and-white by default. A booth in a Saint-Germain café has witnessed conversations that became books. One in a Belleville bar has documented the immigrant experience of modern Paris. The city's booth density is lower than New York or Chicago, but the character of each machine is higher — a Paris photo booth strip carries a different weight, the same way a French film is different from an American one. The machines that survive are mostly in bars that predate the digital age, and they operate with the quiet permanence that characterizes Paris's relationship with tradition.