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Photograph by Luke Beard
The Plaza Theatre is famous for its old-school film screenings, but that’s not the only throwback in the storied movie theater. In the lobby is an analog photo booth from 1960 that shoots and develops printed photos, not digital, spitting out a strip of four images with the gritty, nostalgic charm of traditional printing. For $7 and a four-minute wait, visitors can walk away with a thoroughly retro souvenir.
Only 200 of these functional analog photo booths are left in the world. The company Autophoto, founded by Georgia native Bre Conley Saxon, owns 24 operational booths, including three of the four booths in Atlanta. Conley Saxon, a photographer, found her first photobooth in a Birmingham thrift store in 2009 and spent five years learning how to fix it up. Autophoto now rents booths for events and operates them in several U.S. cities, including the Atlanta ones at the Plaza, Citizen Supply at Ponce City Market, and Hotel Clermont.
Rachel Rowe manages the company’s three local photo booths. A puppet builder for the Center for Puppetry Arts, Rowe has a mechanical mind that loves troubleshooting—and there’s a lot of it needed to keep up a machine with hundreds of parts. “There’s something about the victory of getting them up and running again that’s really satisfying,” she says. “I think it’s the perfect machine. I love the labor that goes into it.”
Courtesy of Rachel Rowe
On a good week, Rowe’s only task is to top up the booths’ processing chemicals, which develop photos like a mini darkroom, with a mechanical “spider” dunking the strip through each step. But most weeks, something goes awry with at least one machine, from errant flashes to broken pieces that need to be Frankensteined back together. Rowe even made a stop-motion animation film titled The Photobooth Technician, to give people a glimpse into her work; a teaser version now screens before Plaza films.
Sometimes the solution is as quirky as the old booths themselves. For years, the photo paper in the Clermont machine jammed on busy nights. After trying every option she could think of, Rowe realized the foot traffic through the hotel was shaking the camera out of alignment: a dollar bungee cord tied around the camera did the trick.
These days, digital photo booths, which require only a computerized camera and a cheap inkjet printer, have largely replaced analog film machines. But while these old-school photo booths are a labor of love as complex as the chemistry that develops their pictures, Atlanta loves them: Citizen Supply’s booth regularly produces 300 strips a week.
“The photo booth is a safe place where you’re the photographer,” Conley Saxon says. “You get to choose what happens behind the closed curtain and walk away with a fine art print. The tangible strip is a memory that lasts beyond your lifetime.”
This article appears in our January 2026 issue.
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