Photobooth: The Same Technology Can Both Liberate and Constrain

A little while ago, I visited the Photographers’ Gallery to see a display celebrating 100 years of the photobooth. (The exhibition is now over, I’m afraid. But you can review the splendid vintage collection of Raynal Pellicer in his book ‘ Photobooth .’) In the decades following the birth of photography in 1839, various designs for self-operating portrait machines were patented. There was an…