Customers wait in line outside the Old Friend Photobooth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Sept. 21, 2024. The young people who line up at Old Friend Photobooth may not have been alive for the analog days — but they still miss them. (Graham Dickie/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of four giddy young women dressed in miniskirts and baggy pants took turns cramming behind a brown curtain and into an apparatus three decades older than they were.
It was an analog photo booth from the 1970s, enclosed within a wood panel structure and nestled within a suitcase shop on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. After they posed — making heart shapes with their hands, sticking out their tongues, putting their arms around one another — the four women huddled by the booth and waited three minutes for a black-and-white photo strip to develop…