Fans line up for the one place in Minnesota where you can find an old-school photo booth

Almost all of us have a device in our pocket that can take a practically unlimited number of high-resolution photographs that we can effortlessly adjust, correct and enhance and instantly share with the world.

Then why do people line up by the thousands at the Minnesota State Fair to pay $5 to take pictures of themselves using a hulking, temperamental 60-year-old machine that takes minutes — agonizingly long minutes — to dispense a damp strip of tiny black-and-white mug shots?

What’s next? A comeback for vinyl records and typewriters?

The machines in question are called photo booths, a coin-operated, nondigital, real film, develop-while-you-wait, camera, photo studio and robotic darkroom all in one.

It’s an analog electro-mechanical contraption squeezed into a package not much bigger than a refrigerator.

And the Arcade attraction at the State Fair next to the Butterfly House may be the only place left in the state that has working examples of the vintage machines.

It’s almost certainly where the highest concentration of vintage photo booths exists in the region (you can find the digital ones plenty of places). Along with the Skee Ball, video games and pinball machines, the Arcade has five Auto-Photo Studio Model 14s dating back to the mid-1960s.

They’ve documented countless sweethearts smooching and sitting on each other’s laps on the little metal stool. Or kids sticking their fingers in their mouths, poking out their tongues and crossing their eyes.

Families have documented the growth of children over the years by making a pilgrimage to the photo booths every year at the fair. Tipsy exhibitionists flash and photograph a body part, hidden behind the booth’s curtain.

They’re drawn to a nostalgic experience that had its heyday decades before they were born but that they may have seen depicted in movies like “Amélie.”

The Arcade also has three digital camera photo booths that can print out a fancy color picture of yourself. But Boettcher said the digital models attract fewer than half the customers that the vintage photo booths do.

“Minnesota fairgoers absolutely love the photo booths,” Boettcher said.

This year the old booths got an extra boost of attention thanks to a recent 8-second TikTok video by @graciekr that has gotten more than 180,000 views.

“I saw this on TikTok,” said Sofia Wigstrom, a 21-year-old White Bear Lake resident, who recently went to the State Fair to take a photo booth picture with her boyfriend, Nicholas O’Brien. “I said, ‘We have to do that.’”

A real, physical memento of their visit to the fair is “more special” than just another smartphone selfie, Wigstrom said.

“I love the actual process of black-and-white photography,” said Annie Dugan of Wrenshall, Minn., who took a photo with her sons, Truman, 10, and Ellis, 8.

“It was like everyone was doing it,” said Avery Atkin, 21, of Woodbury, who was at the photo booth with boyfriend Trey Gnetz. “The photos looked cool. We’ve done photo booths before, but never old school. It’s just like something you can keep.”

At one time, you could get four photos of yourself for a quarter.

They were a cheap and easy way for people to take a selfie, a miniature self-portrait that could mailed to a distant lover, tucked into the corner of a dresser mirror or slipped into a wallet. They were long used to produce photos for identification like train passes.

But photo booths started dying off as government agencies started using their own photo equipment to take identity pictures. The disappearance of dime stores and the availability of cheap disposable cameras also led to the decline of analog photo booths.

Boettcher said some photo booth fans estimate there may be only about 200 or 250 operating film developing photo booths in the world.

The existence of five of the machines at the State Fair is thanks to a man named Todd Erickson, a longtime Twin Cities coin-operated entertainment business owner who used to operate the Penny Arcade at the State Fair.

After he retired and Boettcher took over the Arcade, Erickson showed Boettcher how to keep the old photo booths running.

“He wanted to make sure they lived on,” Boettcher said. “That was his passion and love.”

Inside the 850-pound devices, there’s a custom-made camera loaded with a big drum of film paper. The camera shoots four exposures per customer and cuts off a 1-inch-wide strip of photosensitive paper. That’s dunked by a mechanical arm into a series of tanks containing developer, toner, water, bleach and clearing solutions.

The Arcade has a video playing on a monitor that shows curious customers what the process looks like inside the machine.

“Some people are so fascinated by the process that it goes through,” said Joe Nichols, an Arcade manager and technician.

The booths are stored at the fairgrounds over the winter, and it takes a lot of maintenance when spring arrives to get them running again.

Spare parts are almost impossible to find and the specialized film paper can be hard to get.

Boettcher said he’s had to source the film from Canada and France. Then he was getting it from Ukraine, but the war with Russia interrupted the supply chain and a couple of years ago, he nearly ran out of film before he found a different source.

“We thought it was done,” he said. “It was real touch and go for a while.”

Constant demand during the fair means the machines are working a lot harder than they were originally designed for.

“They get a little testy sometimes,” Boettcher said of the old machines. “They’re a little tired.”

So are the employees who keep them running.

In a work area in the back of the arcade, generations of arcade employees have documented their time working at the fair by creating a sort of gallery of photo booth selfies.

Some of them are making funny faces like their customers.