about us:
Fotoautomat Portugal is home to the only functioning analog photobooth in the country: a 1970 Model 21 that still develops photographs the old-fashioned way, using light, chemistry, and time.
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Founded by artist Hannah Roddam-Kitt, Fotoautomat Portugal began as a decades-long obsession with photobooths, but over the last few years has turned into something much bigger. Today the project is about public art and preservation effort for a disappearing medium.
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In Portugal, photobooths were never really about fun. During the mid-century years, especially throughout the dictatorship (1926–1974), Photomatons were mostly used for passport photos and bureaucracy. They were utilitarian objects. You went in, looked serious, and left with your documents.
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By the time Hannah arrived in Portugal and started talking about placing her photobooth in bars, museums, and public spaces, she was met with dubious ambivalence. Most people barely remembered photobooths at all, let alone with any nostalgia.
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But elsewhere in the world, analog photobooths never lost their cult following. In cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, or New York, people still queue to sit behind the curtain and leave with something tangible.
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That’s what makes this booth novel in Portugal. It’s not a throwback. It’s a first.​​​​
Our mission is simple:
From Lisbon, our small team is building an archival practice disguised as a business;
finding, restoring, and returning analog photobooths to the public.
It’s not nostalgia we’re after; it’s continuity. Evidence that the old school never dies, it just needs a little maintenance and fresh chemistry.
meet the technicians
Hannah Roddam-Kitt
Photobooth owner, Founder of Fotoautomat Portugal, multi-disciplinary artist, and lifelong photobooth obsessive.
She first fell in love with these mechanical time machines as a teenager for the same reason she loves film and design and mail art; because they require patience and presence.
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As the primary photobooth technician, Hannah maintains her hulking 1970 booth the way one tends a historic car …with grease under her fingernails, frequent outbursts of profanity, and the kind of faith only really stubborn people (and old machines) understand.​
Mauro Belem
Photobooth Technician and lifestyle photographer.
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Before his first day training at Fotoautomat Portugal, Mauro had never even stepped inside an analog photobooth. Today he is a devout photobooth nerd. A dedicated tech, eager to keep learning this niche century-old technology and patiently troubleshooting what keeps our 55 year-old machine alive.​
In a field where most of the old masters are gone, Mauro is proof that the craft can still be learned, and that the knowledge doesn’t have to die with the last generation of booth engineers.
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