The old photo booth snaps with new popularity

Lindsay McCormick wasn't ruffled when the camera went off at the same time she was stuffing cash into the photo-booth slot. It was merely her seventh annual photo-booth session with boyfriend Alexander Boogaard at the Jersey Shore - or so she thought.

When she turned to give him a kiss for the camera for the booth's third snap, he was holding an open ring box with a 1.5–carat diamond seated inside.

"He did it perfectly. You can actually see the box and my face," said McCormick, 24. "I was shocked. It's definitely a face you cannot fake."

Despite a digital era in which you can shoot a photo with your phone or even share a grainy image of your baby in utero, the old-fashioned photo booth is still snapping away those four-segment strips. But in the last five years, they have migrated from arcades and malls to tony weddings, corporate parties, and vogue restaurants.

The photo booth at North Bowl in Northern Liberties is always flashing on weekend nights. Servers at El Vez in Center City wear photo strips of themselves in lieu of name tags. At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's holiday party in Plainsboro, N.J., almost everyone mugged for the photo booth. And the senior class at Maple Shade High School plans to beat the local record for 18 people in one photo booth come prom night.

Photo booths are the off-line equivalent of discovering an Easter egg in a computer program - an unexpected turn in an otherwise ordinary day. But with all the high-tech gadgetry out there, why do booths continue to delight?

Unlike your cell phone, BlackBerry, or digital camera, photo booths provide both intimacy and a now-or-never challenge.

In that "crazy small space," you get "only four chances," said Miles Orvell, an American studies professor at Temple University. "It's kind of like a little performance space - and you're on. So, it's exciting. It's like a swimmer jumping off a diving board. You've just got to do it."

Elvis did it.

Bing Crosby too.

So did Jackie and Jack.

And Rickie Lee Jones.

Even Anatol Josepho, the Siberian immigrant who invented the booth, did it, likely right before he sold his creation for a whopping $1 million in 1926.

Nakki Goranin, who spent seven years researching her comprehensive history American Photobooth, calls the booths pure Freudian theater. "Walk in and you can be and do anything you want," she said.

Historically, what people want to be and do has not always been G-rated.

In the 1940s, Mutoscope Photomatic Co. installed photo booths in men's bathrooms in New York City. "They made a ton of money," Goranin said. The company changed hands, and, by the early 1960s, the booths there disappeared.

In the mid-'50s, Woolworth's had to remove the curtains from some machines to discourage women who were stripping off their clothes for the camera, according to American Photobooth.

"This was before Polaroids, and, if you had taken seminude photos, you couldn't take them to the drug store because everyone knew everyone. So this was a safe way to be naughty," Goranin said.

At almost every event she works, Natalie Hirsch, owner of Go Festive in Philadelphia, said she finds herself laughing at what people do with the props she brings. "I see things you couldn't even imagine until you see them," Hirsch said. "We have a hot dog that's really popular."

Gianni D'Abbraccio, who has "seen it all" operating Delaware Photobooth in Newark, adds, "There's definitely been sex in a photo booth."

Still, he acknowledges that most people who step into photo booths are solely having good, clean fun.

"I've never seen anyone come out of a photo booth not happy," said Emily Egner, who works as a wedding attendant for Photo Booth Center in Moorestown, which supplies formal booths uplit with color lamps to match the decor at parties and weddings. "I'm always getting pulled into the photo booth with people I don't know. I have a huge stack of photos of me with strangers."

The advent of digital printers that can cut and print 12 photo strips in one minute - one for everyone in the booth plus a copy for the bride's scrapbook - made photo booths a hit at weddings and parties beginning around 2009.

D'Abbraccio said he operated the only photo-booth company in Delaware in 2006 and it was a hard sell, but a year later he was booked every weekend. Now, he says, there are six companies operating in Delaware alone.

Photo Booth Center, which opened last year, does 50 to 60 weddings during popular wedding months.

Photo booths do double duty at weddings or Sweet 16s, supplying both entertainment and a party favor. Prices range from $650 to $1,500, with the costlier packages including attendants, unlimited photos, scrapbooks for guests to write in, and prop boxes to jump-start the crazy.

But most say the memories that photo booths capture make them priceless.

Sue Long, who rented a booth for her daughter's November wedding in Collingswood, treasures one shot no professional photographer would have supplied.

"There was one of just my daughter and son-in-law. They were kissing each other. There was something about them being in there alone and having that little bit of time together and then all of us getting to share it," Long said. "It made me cry."

Jessica McGrath of Mount Ephraim had to choose between having flowers or renting a photo booth for her March wedding to Daniel Armstrong.

No contest.

"The flowers were going to die," she said.

When Boogaard considered his proposal options, he thought the photo booth was the best tool to capture his girlfriend agreeing to be his wife.

"I wanted to have something to have a memory of it, but I couldn't ask somebody to take a picture at that exact moment," he said of the August proposal.

When the couple marry at Philadelphia's Ballroom at the Ben Sept. 16, there will be a photo booth in the room.