“You can’t have a better photograph than a proper photographic process with the chemicals. With a very expensive digital camera you can get close, but it doesn’t have the warmth or the character.”
– Alan Adler, the most photographed man in Australia
In 1972, Alan Adler (30 May 1932 – 18 December 2024), the owner of a grocery store in Melbourne, Australia, saw an advert for photobooths in his local newspaper. “That supermarket had killed my business, so I needed other income to live on,” he recalled. “So I bought two photo booths, and then when the other vendor operating in Melbourne wanted to sell, I bought his and I went into photo booths full-time.” His business grew to 16 booths.
To check the machines worked, Alan sat in his booths and allowed them to take his picture.
Alan and his wife Lorraine
“We didn’t really make any real money out of the photobooth until the $1 coin came in,” he says. “Before that you had to use four 20c coins and we would charge you 80c. Not many people carried four 20c cents with them so I wasn’t really very popular. Then the $2 coin come out and we were really making money!”
– Alan Adler
Alan check out a machine while on holiday
By the year of his retirement in 2022, only one of Alan’s booths remained, at the city’s Flinders Street railway station. Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman campaigned for its survival and eventually took it over. Now thanks to them, Alan’s work lives on and is celebrated in the book Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits.
Alan with his children and cat
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is published by Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, ccp.org.auperimeterbooks.com
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