‘Making people laugh for a few euros’: Florence’s old school photo booths bring delight to those who wait

Film-set designer Matteo Sani didn’t set out to revolutionise the way we document our lives but, in his own small way, that’s precisely what he has achieved. Around 2008, he chanced upon old analogue photo booths in Berlin and Paris. “I remembered booths just like it from my childhood,” says Sani. “And I thought, ‘What a beautiful thing.’” He has since sourced and restored seven of them, placing them on street corners and piazzas across his home city of Florence. “I want to give people a small space of privacy and freedom, once they close the curtain,” he adds.

The shift was also personal for Sani. After 15 years in the film industry, he had become tired of following productions from set to set. “You’re never home,” he says. The booths gave him a livelihood and a way to stay in Florence and build something of his own. Finding them became a kind of scavenger hunt. Sani spent months tracking down disused booths across Europe in abandoned stations or forgotten shopfronts. Some had been damaged, forced open or left to decay. He brought them back to Florence and taught himself how they worked, piece by piece.

Today, it isn’t unusual to see queues of students, residents and tourists forming outside Sani’s booths. A strip of four black-and-white portraits costs just €3, while colour is €4 – and the entire experience takes only a few minutes. Monocle observes younger visitors realising the booths are analogue. Used to the speed of a phone camera, they wait impatiently, tap the machine and expect the picture at once. “You can’t really stage it, even if you try,” says Viki, who is visiting Florence with her mother from the US. “That’s what makes these pictures feel more natural.” Friends squeeze inside the limited space together, families arrive with prams and dog owners stop by for a turn mid-walk. Sometimes, the first flash goes off before they are ready. By the next frame, there’s laughter. “Making people laugh for a few euros – for me, that’s something wonderful,” says Sani.

For Sani, the booths matter because they preserve something that digital photography has almost erased: a sense of mystery. “They are just tiny rooms,” he says. There’s no photographer, there are also no filters, no retouching and no endless retakes. “You insert a coin and what comes out is the truth,” he says. 

And yet some of Sani’s rescued booths will never return to the street. “[They] are historically important and too delicate to withstand public use,” he says. His long-term ambition is to make them accessible through a public institution. He even has a title in mind: “Museum of the Automatic Portrait”. “The booths I’ve rescued tell a story about photography without a human operator and the evolution of self-portraiture over the past century,” Sani says.

Despite its clear popularity, Sani’s project faces predictable bureaucratic challenges. Four of the seven booths fall under Florence’s labyrinthine heritage-protection rules and permit regulations. “Getting the permission to occupy public land with these booths is almost impossible,” says Sani.

But he persists. Florence is a city that prioritises cultural preservation and the booths make a convincing case for their own enduring importance – documenting fleeting moments behind a curtain, four flashes at a time.