The Fotomat

[Comments have been added.]

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(Does anyone have a picture I could publish of a Fotomat kiosk back when it was open for business? Something you own the rights to. Apparently that was something almost nobody took a picture of. UPDATE: See this post.)

Only I would start an article with a paragraph in parentheses.

You won't remember Fotomats if you aren't of a certain age. They were small drive-up kiosks in the middle of suburban parking lots where you could drop off exposed film, buy new film (or sometimes get a new roll for free), and pick up your 3R prints 24 hours later—without getting out of your car. Picture a toll booth and you won't be too far off.

The bad old days
It was a good business model, at first: the kiosks took up minimal real estate, required only one on-site employee (apparently called Foto-Mates, although I'm not sure if that was a corporate term or not), and offered a service for which there was consistent demand. Wikipedia tell us the company reached its high-water mark in 1980, when there were 4,000 Fotomats in the USA. Not all that many, considering there are currently 33,295 Starbucks locations.

Fotomat Corporation lasted until 2009, but "One-Hour Photo" minilabs basically killed them off before the 1990s arrived. There was a time, though, when getting your film back in just 24 hours was cutting-edge convenience that beat the competition.

The primary driver of technological progress in consumer photography is largely convenience. I say "largely," because sometimes status/prestige are what drive certain trends. But it's mainly convenience. Fotomat's 24-hour turnaround time was fast when it was new, appropriating business from local drugstores and camera stores where you might have had to wait four days to a week for your prints to be "done." It lasted for a while into the era of the minilab only because one-hour processing was expensive at first. The early minilab machines were extremely costly and owners needed to charge more to make their money back—many of them didn't get it, because the machines quickly became cheaper and competition for the business grew fierce. There was a window of time in there when people got upside-down on their investment in minilab machines and never got right-side-up again. But I digress.

Basically the Fotomat gave way to the one-hour minilab for the same reason that the glass-plate stand cameras of the 1880s ("stand" in that term meaning tripod, mostly) gave way to the box Brownie, and that a perfectly good Canon "digicam" (digital point-and-shoot) of, say, 2005 has lost out to a miniaturized mass-produced module in a smartphone. Convenience conquers.

Not for us
Despite being self-identified as a photographer, I always felt separate and apart from popular trends in consumer photography. I did take six full rolls of 36-exposure color film with me when I went to Europe for four weeks when I was 14, on an inter-school trip (and bought two more rolls while I was there—wow, 288 exposures in only four weeks! That was heavy shooting). I got 4x6 prints back when I came home. And when I was very young I owned a Kodak Instamatic and got back the ubiquitous square prints with the date printed in the border.

But in between the Instamatic and the trip to Europe, most of the work I had done was to get black-and-white prints made from black-and-white film at the Bay Point Pharmacy, where I also eventually worked as a clerk and delivery driver. As with color prints, if a picture didn't "come out" you could request a do-over, for free, and I asked for so many do-overs that eventually the Pharmacy instituted a special rule just for me: only one re-do for B&W. I later learned, to my astonishment, that the Pharmacy's B&W prints were made not in some industrial high-volume facility somewhere (as was the case with the Fotomats), which is what I always assumed, but by a local guy with a darkroom in his basement who was doing a little extra work on the side. I wish they had told me that; I would have just cut out the middleman and gone over to his house so I could tell him what to do in real time. I'm sure he would have loved taking directions from a 12-year-old. On the other hand, I might have learned darkroom work a lot earlier than I did.

Back in those days, my memory is that hobbyist photographers and up—artists, pros, etc.—anyone more involved than family snapshooters—thought of themselves as separate and apart from the normal ordinary consumers. We didn't practice photography like everybody else. I never once had a roll of film developed at a Fotomat. I just didn't think of things like that as being for me.

Wrong envelope
When I was poking around the Web looking for Fotomat pictures, I came across a number of stories. One woman who worked as a Foto-Mate said that whenever anyone asked her where the film was developed, she would tell them that there was an underground photo lab right under the kiosk, under the parking lot, and she claimed most people believed her. (Actually the film was processed and printed offsite.) One person had a startling tale that somehow I can't quite see as funny: apparently a woman dropped off a negative to have an enlargement made (a "big" print in those days would have been 8x10), and she left the order in her husband's name. Apparently, unbeknownst to each other, her husband also dropped off a negative for enlargement at the same Fotomat around the same time, and also used his own name. When the poor woman returned and opened her package fully intending to see a group picture of her happy family, she was confronted instead with a pornographic photo of her husband with another woman. Wrong envelope.

That must have been in the '70s. By the '80s, photo processors were cracking down on dirty pictures and people had to be careful what they turned in for processing.

Left over
Parking lot Fotomat kiosks were later repurposed for a wide range of uses. One I saw a picture of became the tiny storefront for a fortune teller; others sold cigarettes or coffee. I saw a picture of one that became a watch repair shop (sort of doubly anachronistic, right?). I also saw a picture of one painted pink and white with a sign that said "Condom Hut." Is that really a purchase you want to drive up and make right out in plain view? Not if you were the guy in the incriminating 8x10, I would guess.

Here's an old ad for the company on YouTube. Digital is really much—much—more convenient.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

craig: "The store I used from to time was lifted up out the parking lot by a tornado."

Mike replies: Ah, but I want to know where it landed, and whether it killed a witch.

Lawrence Plummer: "My one (sad) memory of Fotomat was the day I eagerly picked up a roll of slides that I had wanted in a hurry. Each mounted slide consisted of half of one frame, followed by the half frame of the next shot!"

Nick Reith: "A really great post Mike. Nostalgia, humor and photo history all combined to put a smile on my face. As the British would say, 'Well played!'

"P.S. I wonder if the marriage survived?"

Mike replies: History does not record....

Roger Bradbury: "No Fotomats in England, but I used to get my films done at the local photographer's shop in Buckingham, where I worked. That business had been established in 1863 though it's gone now, and the building still has its North light skylight and window below it for the upstairs studio."

H Bernstein: "This post is The Online Photographer at its most online photographic. Congratulations, Mike, on TOP’s anniversary and for the distinctive blogging voice that you provide the online photographic community. I say community because this blog fosters that feeling of togetherness and conversation. It being too scarce nowadays makes your blog even more appreciated."

Andy Munro: "Wow. Nostalgia. That made me think of Truprint (postal prints UK based so not sure if they were a thing elsewhere). Ah, the anticipation of the prints arriving in the post was a really lovely memory. All gone now. Thanks for that diversion."

Centeredlens: "I grew up near the Fotomat/Condom Hut in Knightsville, Rhode Island. It's no longer there. I remember as a kid the parish priest making a thunderous condemnation of it from the pulpit, saying the Condom Hut was an abomination. (He was later defrocked for abusing his nephew.)"

Thomas Basista: "Back in the day I used Fotohut so much I was on a first name basis with the young woman clerk. She later modeled for me when I tried to do 'serious' portrait work. That kiosk is still there 50 years later, now selling coffee. Now that I think of it, I am surprised that the little building still is standing."

Bob Rosinsky: "There was a Fotomat a couple blocks away from my high school. A popular and pretty blond senior worked there on weekends and after school. As it turned out, she was selling bags of marijuana on the side. She eventually lost her job. I don't remember seeing her at school after that."

Dave: "What a 'blast from the past.' We usually just dropped our film at the drugstore because it was less expensive than Fotomat. Our parents grew up during the Depression, so the extra cost of Fotomat wasn't worth saving a few days."

Jim Palmer: "Today, after having read this yesterday, I noticed that the drive-up coffee shop in town was, in fact, a former Fotomat. I have driven by it for two years and it hadn't occurred to me it's origin. Thank you."

Sean: "A drive-up condom kiosk. Where the road meets the rubber."

Ed. adds: *Rimshot*

Jim Arthur: "I worked at a Fotomat in college but never heard the term Foto-Mate. It was a great gig because my booth was in an odd location in a fairly small town so I rarely saw a customer. I got paid to sit and study. I never had any film developed by Fotomat (which seems crazy now), and looking back I wish I had taken more photos during my college days. I’m sure they would be entertaining today. The haircuts alone would be hilarious. Back then, everyone’s hair made them look like a street punk from an episode of 'Starsky and Hutch.' Here’s Tommy Chong on That 70s Show referring to a picture of a Photo Hut as art. Tommy Chong’s performance here also reminds me of college.  :-) "

Mike replies: I really wish I had taken pictures in college.

Patrick Perez: "I used to work at a Fotomat in the 1900s and it was one of the best jobs I have ever had. In a five-hour shift, I'd interact with people for ~15 minutes. I brought in a stereo receiver and bookshelf speakers and listened to music all day while I read for pleasure. It was a time in my life where I frequently would find myself saying 'I read this really good book yesterday' meaning cover-to-cover."

Comments

[Dennis]

Here's something current, similar, and probably as anachronistic in my mid-western home town in Ohio

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Watch+Battery+Express+LLC/@41.2696628,-80.7820935,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipMctIrn8MvjQxmPRKH6_XBc_2ydwBUk_QDUQ3r4!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMctIrn8MvjQxmPRKH6_XBc_2ydwBUk_QDUQ3r4%3Dw152-h86-k-no!7i5312!8i2988!4m5!3m4!1s0x8833dfa72de8f1f9:0xf099f9b271a3286c!8m2!3d41.2696701!4d-80.7820885

[xf mj]

I’m remembering those huts (actually, in Pittsburgh I think there was a competitor called Foto Hut), and also remembering in later years that drug stores that developed photos left the envelopes out, alphabetized by customer name, to be picked up. The things we trusted others with in past years… they just don’t seem possible today.

Speaking of convenient photo development, I woke this morning with a nostalgia for polaroid peel-a-print pack film. Has that been successfully resurrected? I know some company tried to keep it alive, but I’ve lost track of its status. I still have my 250 land canera somewhere and all this talk about B&W and such has me longing for that kind of offhand photography, and for its real output.

[Albert Smith]

"...Apparently that was something almost nobody took a picture of..."

Yeah, the film was usually rewound before you pulled up to the drive thru.

Speaking of all of the stories of photo processing things that could happen when you turn over film to a minimum wage employee that may not have your best interest in mind, people may wish to check out the Robin Williams movie, ONE HOUR PHOTO. This movie came out right at the end of the heyday of film shooting (one scene a customer of Williams' photo clerk character mentioned going digital, which caused great distress as he explained how film was better). Just know, this is not a comedy. It's dark, all revolving around a loner that live vicariously thru the photos he develops in a one hour lab.

[Speed]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kodak provided overnight processing using chartered airplanes (twin Cessnas for example) that flew to Rochester in the evening and returned early the next morning (around 7:00 am) with the goods.

There wasn't much air traffic to deal with but weather in the lee of the Great Lakes could be more than a little challenging -- especially in winter.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I certainly felt that photo hobbyists were different from snapshooters, and in some ways more like actual professionals.

One thing you leave out is the part slide films played as a status marker. There was a period, 60s and 70s at least, in which using slide films sort-of identified you as a more serious photographer. Maybe earlier, these subtleties of sociology were not something I was very sensitive to in the 1950s.

Seeing good slides actually projected on a decent screen was an experience that invoked what science fiction fans call "sensawonda". The screen was bigger than almost anybody prints even today, and vastly bigger than an 8x10 print, which was the biggest most people ever saw a photo by somebody they knew. (Of course a long show of bad slides with boring commentary was a horrible experience, too, and a bit of a standing joke.)

My mother shot slides or B&W prints, not color prints until much later, which makes her more serious about photography than many people. She was the family photographer, and she kept her photos in relatively good order. And I have them now. She has to have been a significant portion of the source of my interest in photography.

[Bill Tyler]

I never used a Fotomat, but I have fond memories of 24-hour turnaround with Kodachrome, dropping it off at Kodak's lab on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto.

[Mani Sitaraman]

Mike, thank you. This is one of your best.

[Kenneth Wajda]

Contact John Dersham. He has one from around the corner from where I grew up and it’s such a good one. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10154747307735459&type=3&comment_id=10154753268740459 Is the set. About 20-25 images down with Robindale bakery in the background.

[Robert Roaldi]

Interesting thing that they farmed out B&W development to a local guy. With our access to the interweb, it's a bit surprising that there aren't guys like Ctein in most cities doing print work for amateurs like me. I've owned a few colour inkjets and now finally have one that gives me results I like, but the self-teaching by trial and error was not fun and I would have been better off cooperating with some local (more or less) guy who would do the occasional print for me. I have no idea if that could be a viable working model for a printer-person, but you'd think some part-timers would have surfaced during the pandemic. Maybe some have and I just happened not to be aware of any. I can imagine where a local photo club would be a useful way to meet such people, if they exist.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Ironically, that image itself (presumably from a film print) represents a primary reason for the subject’s demise.

[Crabby Umbo]

I was in college in the early to mid 70's (for photography, of course), and it wasn't unusual to meet multiple people in school that had worked at "The Hut" in high school and even well into college. There's a reason why it was a story "arc" on That 70's Show!

[Hudson]

A old joke:

He shots (non-Kodak) film and has it processed at Photomat.

[DavidB]

It reminds me of the "Fotohut" that occasionally appeared in the television show "That '70s Show" that took place in fictional Point Place, Wisconsin.

[Modeled after Fox Point, most likely, the suburb just south of where I grew up. --Mike]

[John Robison]

Speaking of pornography, I worked at a small camera store way back in the 70’s, right on Dearborn in the Loop.
We rented 8mm movie projectors and occasionally had to send them in for service. There was always a dusty box full of super 8 that had never been picked up by the customers. So, when a projector came back we would test it with a random roll of abandoned film.
You see where this is going.
I grabbed a roll and wound it onto the projector, and started the machine. It was a homemade blue movie, poorly lit but you could see enough to realize quickly what the subject matter was. Fortunately it was mid morning, a slow time with no customers in the store so the film was thrown in the box of write off’s and dumped. Lesson learned.

[c.d.embrey]

There was a Fotomat, near me, that sat in the middle of a huge parking lot of a recently closed factory. It was on a busy street and you could see it from a quarter-of-a-mile away.

There were a lot of key-makers (not locksmiths) in old Fotomat buildings. Key cutters are inexpensive and simple to use (no real training required).

[Thomas Rink]

After I had to give up my makeshift darkroom, it were these automated printing services which made me give up photography until the advent of digital. If the finished product (the print) is decoupled from your own input (the negative) by a non-deterministic procedure beyond your control, then how are you supposed to learn and make progress?

Best, Thomas

[PaulW]

I had a couple of friends who worked at Fotomats back in the day. They had some very interesting stories about the "genres" of photography that were dropped off by customers. Apparently, folks having their photos processed didn't realize that a human did the final QC!
One of them also had me convinced for a short time that there was indeed a small lab underneath the Fotomat building.

[mike r in colorado]

I was a user in the Sacramento area in the late 70s. I had them process slide film for me. I normally shot Kodachrome, so they certainly sent it to somebody else's lab. Eventually I got tired of finding ID numbers on slide no. 37's image and switched to somebody else, who most likely sent it to the very same lab.

[Doug C]

Like you I never dropped film at a Fotomat, I saw myself as a serious photographer and was doing B&W in my own lab or at work.

But years later I would use the 1-Hour lab at Wal-Mart if I just had one or two rolls of 35mm and didn't feel like firing up my processor, but it felt odd. After all I could have run the film and I was going to print it in my lab, and had a roller transport processor. Serious lab, right?

I was in line and up behind me came a friend who had a real lab, high volume printing for school shooters and the like. Heck he 1-hour machines himself. So I asked, why are you here? I am here because I am being lazy. He said he was thinking of buying a Fuji Frontier, the machine they were using, and replacing his Noritsu machines.

A little out of my league. I was buying processing for one dollar and he was shopping for a $40,000 machine.

[Michael L Shwarts]

I helped to kill off the Fotomat. I worked at popular one hour lab company. Later I did minilab work at a camera store.

At the one hour, the franchise owner of the store was not a good business guy. I and a friend who worked there did as much of the repairs on the minilab equipment as we could. Also there were times we begged our supplier for enough paper and chemistry to get by until the boss got around to paying his bill.

[Mike S]

Your posting about Fotomat intrigued me, so I went to the archive of everything and anything, YouTube. Fotomat definitely lives on within YouTube. Pam Dawber doing a Fotomat commercial before starring in Mork and Mindy!

[JH]

The stories about the kinds of stuff people send to photo labs reminded me.....
In 1968 when I had a summer off between grad school and work, I spent the summer living at my family home, taking on projects to build and maintain racing cars for friends, and doing photography.
A friend from high school and his father ran a small town weekly newspaper and a professional photography service, doing portraits, events and custom development and printing for other pros. We would hang out at the paper at night using their darkroom for our own projects. Now my friend had a special "discrete" photo service for some of his contacts, so some of the stuff we printed late at night was "interesting" to say the least.
One night, we were just sitting around sharing a bottle of Crown Royal we had splurged on when he got a phone call. It was one of his special clients with a big problem. He had been tipped off that the FBI was planning to raid his studio in the next couple of days to bust him on a charge of making and distributing pornography. Remember this was the J. Edgar Hoover days. Being good friends, we offered to help.
We took the newspaper van which was fortunately empty and drove to this guy's home. He had stored all his inventory in his attic, so we carried a couple of dozen boxes of negatives, prints and records down two flights of stairs and stacked them in the van. It was loaded!
We did not waste time getting out of there and headed back to the newspaper.
Of course, we had to "inspect" the inventory, so we brought a few boxes into the place and perused them while finishing the bottle of Crown Royal. It took most of the night, to check out the prints and a few of the movies.
30 years later at our High School Class reunion, I asked him what he did with that inventory. He stored it in his attic and returned it to his friend after things cooled down. The FBI raided his studio and found nothing. but sfter that he did not do any more business with the guy.
As a side note, this stuff was classic 1950-1960 porn, black socks, masks, etc. One box was photos of strippers in county fairs - were those ladies raunchy! We both thought it would make a great book, or probably several volumes, today.

[Michael J Plews]

In the late 70's the confluence of forgiving color negative film, good point and shoot cameras and and cheap processing led to a flood of photography. I remember reading grumbling in the photo press that good work would not be able to make it up out of the noise.
In 1978 one of my friends got a job at the processing center for the local photo kiosk chain.
He said they saw pictures of about everything under the sun (use your imagination here) but I don't recall him ever mentioning processing pictures of what people were having for lunch.
I suppose there's a point in there somewhere.

[David Stubbs]

In the 70's and 80's, I used to wonder if Fotomat did much business. It was a time when lots of folks took pictures at a rate of "I hope we finish this roll at Easter because I want to see the Christmas pictures". Must have been enough for a time, at least.

[Tom Burke]

I don't recall anything like this in the UK. Possibly because the proportion of the population that had cars was smaller than in the US - drive-throughs didn't become any sort of a thing here until, ooh, the 90s (maybe). McDonalds would have been the first to do them in a big way here. In any case, big out-of-town malls didn't really happen here until the 80s.

Back in the days of monochrome film, casual photographers (and I'm not sure how many of those there were) would have taken their film to the local chemists' shop (trans: drug store) which arranged d&p - somehow, I don't know how. Once colour print film became really popular - which I remember from the late 70s onwards - there was a battle royal between High Street shops that would do 24-hour turnaround (1-hour, for a premium) and Royal Mail-based. Amateur Photographer magazine used to do comparisons of speed, cost and quality in terms of a set of 4x6 prints between the leading national contenders of each. The mail-based solution worked in the UK because of the smaller size of the country, of course - very few places would not have had a 'following morning' delivery option, probably only the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland. And every town had at least one High Street photo processor.

Of course, keen amateurs did their own d&p, at least for mono - I certainly did. When chromogenic film came along, I used to get the film developed but did my own printing.