The lobby inside the historic Florence Building has been fairly quiet the past few decades. The downtown landmark, once a hotel, has ground-floor retail shops that you can access from the sidewalk and upstairs office tenants. For years, the lobby was mostly a corridor for the public — a way to get to Red Bird Wine Bar, and later Second Set Bistro, or grab coffee and treats to go from Drum Coffee and Posh Chocolat’s lobby stand. It wasn’t really a destination.
That’s been changing. Last fall, Lauren Taylor, whose family owns the building, opened Historic Florence Cocktails & Coffee with Paige Livingston of the boutique One Eleven, as The Pulp reported. The Mediterranean restaurant Sumac followed, serving breakfast, lunch and happy hour. Now the lobby has a newer, smaller addition: a digital photo booth, just outside the entrance to the Missoula Makers Collective — one of the ground-floor shops in the building.
The booth belongs to a friend of the collective: Lauren Niebur, who works in marketing for a women’s outdoor apparel brand and restored this booth herself. Niebur got the idea to open a photo booth after her grandfather died earlier this year. She had taken comfort in looking through old photo albums.
“Having physical media is so important. I don’t want people to leave all their memories on their phones.”
“It was so fun to look back on our family photos,” she said. “Having physical media is so important. I don’t want people to leave all their memories on their phones.”
When her friend returned from a trip to New York raving about the photo booth scene, Niebur was inspired. After lots of research, she purchased a photo booth from someone in Texas. When she told her friends at Missoula Makers Collective, they were excited about the idea and agreed to provide the space.
When the booth arrived, it was in rough condition. “It was a mess, if I’m being completely honest,” Niebur said.
Utilizing the skills she’d acquired from a wiring class she took in high school, she was able to get the booth functioning. She then changed the exterior of the booth to match the decor of the Florence, applying a burl-wood contact paper to go with the building’s elevators, and adding a green velvet curtain and printed bronze signs to match the lobby furniture and the building’s bronze trim.
The booth takes four photos in a strip, and you can choose various filters and themes, plus pick between color and black-and-white. So far the booth has been a success and has already printed 600 vends — the equivalent of 1,200 photo strips.
“We see folks use it all day,” said Bailey Durnell, co-owner of Missoula Makers Collective.
In fact, when I spoke with Durnell recently, the photo booth had run out of ink that day from so much use. But an Instagram story the next day announced that it was back in action.
Photo booths are having a revival, like records, CDs, and — ahem — print newspapers.
The history of the photo booth can be traced back a century: In 1925, Siberian-born inventor Anatol Josepho unveiled the Photomaton on Broadway in New York. For a quarter, customers stepped into a private booth and walked out 10 minutes later with a strip of eight photos, at a time when getting a studio portrait meant an appointment and a real expense. The machine was a hit, and photography got a little more democratic.
Photo booths spread to train stations, department stores, malls and amusement parks. They became a cheap way to get a passport photo, but also a private little room to be goofy or sentimental with the people you loved. That mix of privacy and instant photo strip made them a fixture, especially for artists and musicians.
Digital cameras and smartphones didn’t kill the booths so much as the maintenance did. Keeping an analog machine running got expensive and complicated. Historians put the number of working analog booths worldwide somewhere around 200 to 300 now, which makes digital versions — like the Florence’s — one of the more common ways the tradition survives.
For a long time, Missoula’s former department store the Bon Marché (before that, the Merc, and now a Residence Inn by Marriott) had a photo booth. Right now, the only other photo booth downtown besides the one in the Florence is at the carousel in Caras Park. Elsewhere in Missoula, you can find booths at Southgate Mall and Westside Lanes.
Niebur said she’s excited to continue searching for more photo booths to purchase and refurbish, so she can help people take their memories into a more tactile reality.
“Having printed photos of people that you love is so important,” she said. “Don’t let your only archive of your life be on a cell phone.”
