Meet a Maker - Marco Ferrari

We are delighted to be having Marco Ferrari exhibit his photobooth work at The International Photobooth Convention. To introduce himself, Marco told us a bit about why he has a love for analogue photo booths, and about the work, he creates in them.

I was born in Italy and now live in London. I got into photography, and analogue photography through Polaroid I was fascinated by all the different cameras they built and how specific and technical they were.

Photobooths in Italy were (and still are in their digital version) used for passport and ID purposes and they were available mainly in train and bus stations but also on street corners. They were outside, available 24/7 and often vandalised. I remember using the one at my hometown train station with friends during our first nights out as teenagers. We were usually a group of 4 and we were cutting the 4 frames to keep one each. Then all of a sudden the analogue booths were all replaced by digital machines. In my hometown, it happened quickly because we had only two, in bigger cities the last ones were removed in 2008.

Since then we felt the loss of something we gave for granted, the unpredictability of analogue machines was replaced by cold and impersonal digital booths. This is when the analogue photo booth started to reappear in Europe after years of neglect, partly thanks to the "Amelie factor", first in Berlin, then in other German cities and slowly in all of Europe. I started to travel and to use photo booths everywhere I found them: Berlin, Riga, Cesena (Italy), Paris, Helsinki, London and Toronto (Canada). 

Everywhere I went I was mainly looking for new ways to take portraits of unknown people. The photo booth is the perfect camera to make people comfortable. You are on your own and you see yourself in the glass without a photographer staring to you. In 2009 I had the chance to buy my own photo booth, probably the last surviving Dedem FT-22 colour booth and I stepped into the world of technicians, understanding more and more the technology that makes everything possible.

With it, I shoot almost everything: from lingerie to abstract pieces, from Christmas cards to a whole 24 hours in photos. Here in London, I am helping the guys at Photomaquina (they have 5 of the 6 photo booths now available to use) and I use them for my personal work. I am taking hundreds of photo strips per year and I have 3 ongoing projects at the moment: INKED in which I take photos of tattooed people, PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THE BOOTH in which I explore the reaction of photographers to the automatic portrait and a series of more simple and delicate portraits a friend of mine called SOBER portraits. The photo booth is a slow camera and in the 3 minutes waiting for each photo the sitter is not unknown anymore. This, with its sounds and even smells, is what makes the photo booth magic.

You can see more of Marco's work on his website, or by following him on Instagram.