Flinders Street Photobooth

In exchange for a handful of gold coins, the iconic Melbourne machine captures memories that last for more than just a few moments.

Once a week, a jump-scare ‘featured’ photo on my iPhone causes me to cringe. I set it up to display memories from my camera roll – a rush of sentimental sweetness always in my pocket. But the flashbacks are often unmoving ... and sometimes even unwelcome.

Recently, I cleared my desk of junk and uncovered a dusty stack of photos held together by a brittle rubber band. Damaged polaroids, 35mm film snaps and a handful of photobooth strips. Soft-edged memories that stirred far richer emotions than the hollow nostalgia of my camera roll ever could.

“Our lives are so intangible now,” Jessie Norman, co-owner of Melbourne’s Metro-Auto-Photo, tells me. For her, vintage strips are “chemically-made mechanical miracles.” Jessie and her fiancé Chris Sutherland operate the Flinders Street Photobooth, alongside five other machines across the city.

“If the only photo that exists is the one that you hold in your hand, and there’s no digital footprint, the tangible quality of it is special. There’s something different about having a fingerprint-smudged photo album,” she says.

One of my desk-drawer miracles came from the booth at Flinders Street Station. It’s been a fixture in central Melbourne for 65 years – run for 50 of them by late legend Alan Adler. And it’s where the story begins for Jessie and Chris.

A first date that evidently went quite well was marked with a happy snap as the couple squeezed into the iconic photobooth for a kiss. But there was a notice announcing the machine’s removal due to the Metro Tunnel works with Adler’s phone number written underneath.

“[Alan] was 90 and his family weren’t taking the booth over. But we knew we couldn’t just let these wmachines disappear,” Jessie shares. The couple rallied enough people to get the attention of the council and find a new spot for the machine. They also submitted Adler for the Lord Mayor's Small Business Achievement Award to celebrate his half-century of operation, which he won.

As the relationship between Adler and the couple developed, he agreed to sell them his fleet of machines – some of which had sat untouched in a shed for over 20 years. Jessie and Chris have since become part of a global community of 60-odd booth operators – “a real mix of old-school guys and new-age kids.”

In the age of post-filter Instagram and parasocial everything, these booths feel like a rare gift. A reminder that memories aren’t made by chance but by choice. Each one sits somewhere in Melbourne that matters to the couple (who also got engaged at the Flinders Street Photobooth): outside Hillvale photo lab, beside Cinema Nova and in the dining room at The Curtin Hotel. I found that last one at my housemate’s birthday; every pint loosening our poses until we were juggling a dozen strips with nowhere to stash them.

You don’t get that from a phone. The feeling is stitched into the making, not just the image. You pose differently as you squeeze into the frame. No angles or do-overs, just three and a half walls that pull people closer.

Featuring FLINDER'S STREET PHOTOBOOTH IN NAARM/MELBOURNE

Written by JAMES WILLIAMS | @james_williams

Photographed by PHILLIP HUYNH | @afloralfrenzy