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How do you picture yourself?

New Statesman·Rachel Cunliffe·26 days ago
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Photo by Martin Brent/ Millennium Images, UK W hat if I told you there was a magical box you could step into in which you could reinvent yourself and take your identity into your own hands? You walk past such boxes all the time, without ever noticing their psychic sorcery. If the humble photobooth does not seem an obvious topic for a radio show about social history, use your imagination and cast your mind back a hundred years, to when Anatol Josepho’s “Photomaton” first hit New York. The technology was an instant success: for 25 cents a pop, ordinary New Yorkers could enter these new automatic photobooths, trusting a mysterious machine to capture their likeness and leaving with a freshly printed strip of personal portraits. A Century in a Click is an ode to the romance of the photobooth – its intimacy, its power, its influence on how we see ourselves. “Anything can happen when you walk into this machine,” we are told in a tone of breathless wonder.…

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