Step Inside the Strip: The Los Angeles Photo Booth Museum Is Here
A new home for analog history in Silver Lake.
Over the last ten years, it has been a dream of ours to create a photo booth museum.
At first, we just wanted to keep vintage photo booths alive — not tucked away in collectors’ garages or forgotten in the corners of amusement parks, but out in the wild, where they belong. We’ve spent years tracking them down, fixing them up, and giving them new life in record stores, cafés, arcades, and now — in a sunlit storefront on Sunset Boulevard — we’ve finally given them their own home.
The Photo Booth Museum, now open at 3287 W Sunset Blvd in Silver Lake, is part time capsule, part love letter. It’s a place to step out of time, duck behind a curtain, and feel the mechanical click of a camera capturing something fleeting and real. Every booth here shoots on real film and prints real strips — no filters, no re-dos. Just four frames, forever.
Inside, you’ll find five fully operational booths from different decades, each one restored by hand. Around them: a curated collection of analog oddities, original signage, vintage prints, and ephemera from a pre-digital world. But this museum isn’t a static archive. It’s alive with laughter, conversations, dates, family portraits, and awkward first-timer poses.
Because at its core, this place is about people.
It’s about the teenage girls in the ’60s writing their numbers on the back of strips. The queer couples in the ’80s who finally had a safe place to kiss on camera. The grandparents who walk in and say, “Oh my god, I haven’t seen one of these since…”
The idea for the LA Photo Booth Museum came from conversations like those — moments we’ve witnessed again and again while maintaining booths across the country. There was always a story. Always a spark. We wanted to give those memories a home. And now, we have.
We’re grateful for the warm welcome from the LA community and honored to be featured in publications like The LA Times, Timeout, and LA Weekly — each of which helped tell this story in their own way.
This is our second museum (our first opened in San Francisco’s Castro District), and it marks the next chapter in our mission: to preserve analog history not in glass cases, but through experience.
Whether you’re coming to take a strip with someone you love, to show your kids how it used to be, or just to wander and remember — we hope you’ll find something that feels meaningful here.
Come visit.
See you in the booth,
The Photomatica Team
