New York, September 1926. “Take a picture of yourself! Eight poses in eight minutes” was posted on Broadway, on the corner of 51st and 52nd Streets. It was the first automated photo studio in the world, without the need for professionals, to make a list of eight photos for 25 cents and in a few minutes. The artifact was invented and patented by the 32-year-old Siberian Anatol Josepho.

Anatol Josephewitz, who later changed her surname, moved to Germany at the age of 15, where she learned the profession of photographer. At the end of the First World War he went to Shanghai, where he came up with the invention when he was in that Chinese city. But it was not until he arrived in New York that he obtained the capital necessary to carry out the idea: That's $11,000. The investment quickly became profitable.

According to the Times Magazine of April 1927, in the middle of the year 280,000 people used a machine called photobooth. At the end of that year the cabin arrived in Europe and Canada and in France, for the first time, it was called Photomaton. But at that time Anatol Josepho did not own the machines. On March 28, 1927, the cover story of The New York Times stated that Josepho had sold the rights to operate the photo booth for $1 million. The amount of money was huge at the time, but the most controversial was what Josephus did with the money: he donated half a million for acts of charity. People did not understand what Anatol had done and, being Siberian, they mistook altruism for communism. Fortunately, McCarthy’s persecution was still a few years away, and Josepho retired to Los Angeles in 1928 to live quietly for another half a million.

In that year, the surrealist André Breton wrote that the photomathon was “a system of psychoanalysis by image.” In 1963, Andy Warhol used the photo booth to make the famous portrait of Ethel Scull. And today, in the middle of the age of digital photography, despite the fact that computers and mobile phones have photo booth applications, personal document photography is being used by the heirs of that booth that Josepho set up on Broadway 85 years ago.