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Gen Zer’s dad has taken photo booth photos of himself every year since he was 18: ‘My dad is 64 now. Wanna cry knowing he’s growing up too’

One content creator’s dad has endeared TikTok with a nostalgic birthday tradition he’s kept up since he was just 18. Spoiler alert: It involves the good ol’ photo booth.

On May 26, creator and singer-songwriter Ellie Basty (@elbiebastyy) shared a heartwarming fact about her father: Since his 18th birthday, he’s “taken a photo of himself in a photo-booth.”

“My dad is 64 now,” she wrote in the comments. “Wanna cry knowing he’s growing up too.”

As the 20-second video plays, we see a series of photo booth strips of Ellie’s dad’s changing looks. Alongside each strip of photos is a handwritten note about where and when they were taken. Ellie’s dad even attempted to start her on the tradition when she was a baby, but she continued it on her own when she turned 18.

“Nov 4th 2003 Woolworth’s Sutton,” read the note next to Ellie’s first strip with her dad.

‘this is so cute but where are photo booths nowadays’

“Is your dad a vampire,” @ezapperr joked, referencing Ellie’s dad’s agelessness.

“this is so dope. I love photo booths but I feel like it’s a group thing. definitely gonna start doing this this year,” @honestlyliterallygrim wrote.

“this is so cute but where are photo booths nowadays,” @grinch.slippers replied.

It’s a valid question. Truly vintage photo booths, while popular with millennials and Gen Z-ers, aren’t easy to come by. These days, authentic photo booths are sometimes located in the back of dive bars or at old arcades.

The photo booth debuted at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, and a Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho was credited with the world’s first fully automatic photographic machine, which he dubbed the Photomaton. The Photomaton was located in New York City on Broadway and 51st Street, not far from tourist mecca Times Square. The machine is recognized as the first to “produce self-sufficient machine printing high-quality images,” according to Curator. Color photo booths emerged in the mid-1990s.

So what’s the appeal?

With iPhones that have multiple lenses and ultra-high-definition resolution, why opt for a musty box that produces lower quality images? According to one Zoomer, it all comes down to the experience.

“Even though we now have an iPhone 14 with better lenses,” Frianna Gultom told the Wall Street Journal of her first photo booth experience, “it just doesn’t beat the experience of doing something by yourself or with your friends and capturing it with an actual strip of film.”

It’s possible that for individuals who grew up in a majorly technological age that values instant gratification and the ability to easily modify perceived imperfections, a photo booth offers a welcome change of pace.

“The retro film strips satisfy a craving for authenticity among young people weary of hyper-edited social media feeds,” Hannah Miao wrote in the Wall Street Journal. To put it simply, there’s a timelessness to it.

And just as Ellie and those her age were drawn by the nostalgic appeal of a photo booth, such may have also been the case for her dad, whose earliest documented photo booth strip appears to be from the late ’70s. By this time, photo booths had become a prominent means of immortalizing moments among some of the world’s most iconic names.

“Jack and Jackie Kennedy stepped into one in the 1950s. Yoko Ono and John Lennon included a reproduction strip with their 1969 recording, Wedding Album. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol shuttled models with rolls of quarters from booth to booth in New York City,” Kenneth R. Fletcher wrote for Smithsonian.magazine

“When we were using the photo booth in the ’80s, we were very much into nostalgia,” Richie Cohen told the Wall Street Journal of the daily snapshots he’d take with Duane Tragis during their time at Rutgers University. “We were always looking back to the ’50s and ’60s, wishing we could have lived back then.”

And now, as the use of portable digital photo booths have grown in popularity at big occasions like wedding receptions or milestone parties, there’s nothing quite like an old-school “chemical bath” — a fact that Ellie’s dad, in all of his indie glory, has powerfully demonstrated.

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