07.09.2015 Ready for a new week

02.09.2015 RIP

29.07.2015 Below Ground

21.07.2015 Red vs Blue

16.06.2015 Feeling Watched?

15.06.2015 The Eagle and the Deer

29.10.2014 The bird's coming home to roost

Christofurr In Berlin

Outside the Reichstag

Hanging out with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck

Celebrating the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War at the Siegessäule 

In Berlin

Photoautomat

The humble photobooth, like red telephone boxes, are getting harder and harder to find, but what do we know of it's history?

A Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho invented the automatic photobooth. After being inspired by the legendary Brownie box camera a young Josepho decided that photography was for him so enrolled in a local technical institute to learn. At fifteen he made the decision that Siberia was too small for him and he wanted to see the world. He convinced his father to give him money to get to Berlin and was sent off with these words:

'Life itself, my son, is the supreme teacher. Go. Travel. Work. Study. Listen... Come back when you will. I'll still be waiting for you. And I want to be proud of you when you come back. Remember that, my boy, won't you?'

When in Berlin he happened upon a photo studio, walked in and convinced the owner to hire him and teach him to be a photographer. Here he learnt his trade and first began to develop the idea of creating a faster, more efficient and cheaper way of creating photos and thus making it more widely available for the masses, much in the same way the Brownie cameras had done. At the age of nineteen he began designing a self-operating, coin-operated photo machine. He even built a primitive prototype.