Not much in Melbourne has stayed the same since 1960, but the Flinders Street photobooth has been a constant. That’s thanks to Alan Adler, who ran the photobooth for 50 years.

Adler died on December 18, 2024, at the age of 92. But the Flinders photobooth he dedicated his life to servicing – and the others he had around Melbourne – will continue to run, giving passers-by the chance to freeze a moment in their lives in black and white.

Couple Chris Sutherland and Jess Norman have taken up Adler’s mantle and have vowed to keep the booth alive. To understand how they got into the world of chemical photobooths – and how they became friends with a then-octogenarian Adler – we have to look back to 2018 and their first date.

“The date was going really well and so we went to the Flinders Street photobooth,” says Norman. After they took a snapshot kissing in the booth, they saw a note from Adler saying, “Please use this photobooth now. After May 23, this machine will no longer be here.”

Alongside the note, Adler had left his phone number. So they gave him a call and helped hatch a plan to save the booth. Adler told them he was glad they called because he had a lot of papers and chemicals left over, and it would be a shame for the booth to close and to have all that product go to waste.

Having saved the booth, Sutherland, who was in film school at the time, asked to document Adler’s work. “Our friendship grew from there,” he says. “There was never any intention of us wanting to take over his business; it was purely just an act of preservation.”

The couple spent weeks – and then years – watching Adler undertake the physically arduous task of servicing each of his photobooths, testing the exposures, cleaning off graffiti with turps and adjusting flashes.

“About five years later, we convinced him that we weren’t going anywhere,” says Norman. “At the time, he was turning 90, and we said, we’re the best people to look after [the machine] and we’ll treat it well and keep it going for another 50 years.”

The couple now own and service four vintage photobooths around the city and have plans to expand the business.

Adler, who ran the booth from 1972 to 2022 at Flinders Street, also stumbled into the business unintentionally.

“He had a grocery shop in Hawthorn and then he just saw an ad in the back pages of The Age in 1972, I think,” said Sutherland. “It said two [machines] – I don’t even think it said photobooths – promising $70 a week which he thought, ‘Oh, wow, that sounds like a great business venture’. They were at the station. And then I think the guy that sold them to him went back to London. So, he basically had to learn quickly.”

Learn he did and, at the height of his business, Adler operated 16 chemical photobooths around Melbourne.

“I asked him ‘Do you consider yourself a photographer?’ And he scoffed and said no,” says Sutherland. “I think for him, and I guess his era of people, you didn’t really have the luxury of pursuing a creative job or pursuing hobbies. He just needed the job and had kids to provide for. Over time though, like anything you dedicate your life to, he found things that he was passionate about within it and things that he enjoyed doing.”

Despite being a self-confessed non-photographer, “Alan has produced one of the largest collections of photographs, like, ever, and he hasn’t seen any of them except for his test strips.”

The test strips – photos of himself – are something Alan would take constantly throughout the day to check for jams and correct exposure and chemical levels. Boxes upon boxes of these test strips were unearthed when Sutherland was filming Adler for his film school project. (“We weren’t lying when we said he’s the most photographed man in Australia, for sure, but possibly the world,” says Sutherland.)

Many of these test strips have been included in a book on Adler’s life Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits which was co-published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions.

For Norman, her favourite shot of Alan is the one the three of them took at the opening of their photobooth at The John Curtin Hotel. The party doubled as an engagement party for Norman and Sutherland. (They got engaged in the Flinders Street photobooth and, when they showed Adler the strip, he initially missed both the ring and Norman’s shocked expression and just said “this is a really good quality strip”.)

Moving on without Adler, the couple is braced to undertake their own 50-year tenure as custodians of the Flinders Street photobooth.

“To say that we’ve thrown every egg in this basket is an understatement,” said Sutherland. “I’m currently sitting in a warehouse full of thousands of random parts and rubber rollers and all sorts of junk. We hope to get his fleet of 16 machines back up again around Melbourne, just because it’s such a special thing that you can still do in 2024.”

In June, there will be an Centre of Contemporary Photograph exhibition of Adler’s work and photobooths at RMIT Galleries which according to Sutherland “focuses on Alan’s 50 years, the machines themselves, but also celebrating Alan’s effect on the community.”

The pair will also head to New York for a convention to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the photobooth with their fellow photobooth operators and all raise a glass to the half century Adler spent tending to Melbourne’s booths.