DJ duo Make A Dance talk shared influences, personal style and TDR, filmed at Next Door Records Two, London's record shop and community hub.
TALK DISCUSS RAMBLE
AUTOFOTO
We sat down with Rafa and Taha, the team behind AUTOFOTO, to talk maintaining decades-old machines, the ritual of analogue, and why photo booths still have a place in an increasingly digital world. Rafa wears the SS Dobby Cloth Noragi Shirt Aran and 2 Tuck Pant Navy, Taha the 3D Seamless Cotton Crew Menthe and Noragi Short Navy, both from TDR. They spoke about the work involved in keeping the machines running and why, for Rafa, TDR stands for 'Taha Does the Rounds'.
Who are you guys and what do you do?
Taha: I'm Taha and I'm one of the technicians at AUTOFOTO London.
Rafa: I'm Rafa. I'm the founder of AUTOFOTO. We restore analog photobooths from the 20th century, and we put them in various locations in London and Barcelona. Also we make them available for artists, makers, creators to use as their camera of choice.
Why do you think it's important to maintain and keep alive these forms of analogue media?
Rafa: There is a little bit of a ritual with the analogue. First, you don't see the picture when you take it, and then it takes a little bit of time. And then you hold on to that kind of printed image. I think that is the beauty of going back to that old way of dealing with images.
What's it been like for you guys learning how to fix, repair, set up these machines?
Taha: A few years ago I wouldn't have been able to point to anything or know where much was. Maybe where the chemistry was, because that's the first thing that would make sense - the paper must go through it at some point to get the image. Being here, I had to take a lot of things apart, working on things, and you understand why things work and why certain things are in certain places.
There's a lot of patience required when it comes to fixing these machines. Do you take the patience that you've learned from photo booths into other aspects of your life?
Taha: When you see how it works, after you take a picture, you need to wait four minutes for the picture to be delivered. So there's always this wait, this patience. If you need to test the seven carriers in the booth seven times for 28 times, you need to wait half an hour to test every single carrier to see that everything is okay. So there is a point of resignation. And I often tell the guys, please don't rush it. Because when we rush it, we fuck it up. Now, I would love to tell you that I don't rush things, but I'm still rushing. I have two kids, I have this, I have that, and I'm always running around. But I think there is a lesson here to be said about: look, this follows its course. And you need to be patient because you cannot speed it up. I believe I might apply this sometimes, somewhere.
How does it make you guys feel that what you do results in this piece of media that sits on so many mantelpieces and fridges across London and has made so many fond memories for people?
Rafa: So when I started, I was very bad - I didn't have social media, I didn't have a web page. It was almost a quest to find my 4 or 5 photo booths that were in London. And I still remember going to the parents of my daughter's friends and suddenly seeing that photo strip on the fridge and then asking what is this from? Is it from London? Is it from somewhere else? It was from London. I knew it was from one of my photobooths. It was such a sense of fulfilment that suddenly that booth was there. Last week, we were at Photo London, and it was one of the few playful things in the fair. There were amazing photos, of course, in all the galleries, but this was an interactive thing that people could take back home. And seeing the giggles inside the booth - the stress you have basically pays off almost immediately. First flash, every six seconds, there's a flash, there's a rush, there's some kind of nerves, some kind of pushing people around and giggles, giggles, giggles - and that just suddenly it all makes sense.
What kind of role has London played for both of you in the development of AUTOFOTO and your career more generally?
Rafa: So I came to London in 2000, just for a couple of years, to do a PhD. I was fully funded and I was like, look, I'm going to be here a few years then go back to Barcelona, which is an amazing city as well. And yeah, I'm not going to get older in this city. I'm not going to have kids in this city. And, you know how time goes - my wife is from here. My two kids are Londoners. They laugh about my Spanish accent, which I cannot get rid of, even though I've been living in London many more years than them. But I think this city is ready for anything anyone might have in their minds - here it feels like you put an idea in someone's head and that person will find accomplices that will help him or her realize that.
Taha: I mean, London's played a very big role because I'm not from here. I just moved here when I was 18. But it's been amazing. It's where I learned about these photobooths - and they weren't around where I grew up. There were a few in Toronto where I lived for a long time. But I'm originally Iraqi, Kurdish, and these weren't in the Middle East much. There was evidence that they were in Egypt. My parents never used these, as kids, we never really saw these around much. So it's because of moving to London, I've learned what analogue photos are - and not just learned them, but been a part of them, a part of the team who's fixing them, repairing them, and a part of keeping them alive - it's because of London, it wouldn't have happened otherwise.
What sort of mark do you want AUTOFOTO to have left on either London or photo booths as a whole?
Rafa: Through Instagram, this community of photo booth nerds, we are sharing a lot, and we are already at the point in which we are rebuilding lots of parts. And I think AUTOFOTO is playing a key role there, in which, with my partner from Barcelona, Francesc, who's a mechanical engineer, we are kind of re-engineering parts, still keeping the essence of the booth. I think towards the future. This is what we are doing, trying to share all the know-how, anything we discover, and when other operators contact us, we share the information, we put things online. And I think this is what's going to make the booth survive another hundred years because the information is out there.
What's next for AUTOFOTO?
Taha: Something important that I would love to pursue in the future is that Arab people are not really documented in the photo booth. It wasn't really around in the Middle East. And for me to hopefully one day document Kurdish people or Arab people, to work with my communities with the photo booth would be something amazing. To capture, to have, for people to see or for me to even just to see how it would be around, if you were to just place a photo booth in the middle of Jordan where I was born, where it never was, just to document the people there or to take it to Kurdistan, and put it there, just to capture - whether it's part of a project or to document the people there or the traditional clothes we wear or the foods we eat. It's a camera and I'm a photographer and it's an element that I would love to play with in the future.
Rafa: I think there's a couple of aspects that I'm super interested in. One is to keep on pushing the boundaries of what these machines can do. Also trying to play with the format rather than having the single strip. Maybe we can do one big picture, just playing a little bit with the format that would be really playful. And I think when it comes to my own practice, I just need to have a bit more time to just develop my own practice. I have a project with a documentary maker called The Real Selfie Project, in which we just kind of juxtapose precisely the personal stories of the sitters with that portrait.
So we did a project with Hackney Council and the Autograph Gallery, in which we took a photo booth to a Windrush party. And it was amazing because everyone was talking about how they came to the UK, how they thought they were going to be welcomed with open arms, and then the racism, the grey skies and how badly received they were. It was quite poignant that they were taking their picture in the passport machine, to explain their real stories on how they came here. So having more time to do these things, just carving some space to develop our own projects.
Last but not least, what is your TDR?
Rafa: I have two things. So something I didn't tell you is that I love motorbikes. So TDR, there's a Yamaha TDR 250, which is an off road bike, made with nice plastics and stuff that was going around in the 90s. But also, because I'm here and because Taha is here, 'Taha does the rounds.' He goes from booth to booth. He's like, are you gonna do the rounds this morning? Okay, do the rounds.
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