The first analogue photobooth made its debut just over 100 years ago, in 1925 New York. Originally designed to fit one person, they quickly became popular among couples: there’s something unavoidably intimate about huddling together to fit the frame in such a confined space; something romantic about freezing a moment in amber, as if assured of its future importance. After their mid-20th century heyday, photobooths entered into a fallow period, becoming more functional than exciting (no-one is having a sexy time when they’re applying for a new passport).

But much like the Polaroids and disposable cameras that followed, photobooths have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. When it’s easier than ever to snap a photo, likely to disappear from our Instagram stories in 24 hours and languish unseen in the depths of the cloud, we seem to be drawn once again to tangible documents of our lives, even when capturing a love that may not last longer than the night. 

/STRIPPED/, a new photobook by photographer Oli Raptor and published by Bona Varde, uses the analogue photobooth as the stage for a dizzying celebration of erotic freedom and queer intimacy. Captured alone or with friends and lovers, Raptor’s subjects grin and pout at the camera, expose and contort their bodies, embrace each other, and, in one memorable strip that we at Dazed were too prudish to publish in the attached gallery, pose alongside two erect penises.

Oli Raptor (real name Oliver Sarley) is a London-based artist whose work documents queer life. His debut book Outsider/s, also published by Bona Varde, was shot in natural settings across London, the US and Europe. That sense of pastoralism is absent in /STRIPPED/ – there are no idyllic forests here – but the project is animated by the same spirit. “I’m known for doing outdoor nudes in public spaces and cruising grounds, so I wanted to carry the sense of joy, pleasure and freedom that I capture in those moments to the enclosed space of the photobooth,” says Raptor. The original inspiration came from two photobooth strips that he took with a lover at a bar in Seattle back in 2017. He kept one copy and his lover kept the other, but eventually lost it in a house fire. “I thought it was a shame, but I had an image of the two strips together, so I used that in the beginning of the book.”

Part of the appeal of working with photobooths, for Raptor, is that the medium is about as analog as it gets. “There’s no film, so each strip is a one off,” he says, which lends them an archival quality. The photobooth has a particular resonance in queer history too: back when queer couples were compelled to hide their identities and keep their relationships secret, using them together was an opportunity to articulate and document their love in a quasi-public, quasi-private space. “I wanted to capture a little bit of that [queer history], even though we are able to be more open today,” he says. 

While working on the project, Raptor drew upon a number of influences. One of the biggest, not surprisingly, is Andy Warhol, whose Photobooth Pictures are probably the single most famous use of the medium in art history – and like Warhol, Raptor himself appears in many of the images. In that regard, he was also thinking about the photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who often appears in his own work, mostly through self-portraits taken in mirrors. Nan Goldin was another source of inspiration, particularly due to the way she took photographs of her friends and lovers, as was Slava Mogutin, who provides a blurb quote for the book. While making the project, Raptor was also listening to music by the late Patrick Cowley, a composer known for his collaborations with disco artists like Sylvester, as well scoring pornographic and erotic movies in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps some of the libidinal, propulsive quality of Cowley’s work bleeds into the images.

All of Raptor’s subjects are drawn from his community in one way or another. “There is a real mixture of lovers, friends and strangers; some people I know through friends of friends; people who showed up with other people,” he says. Some of the photographs were taken “guerilla-style” in booths across London – a way of "pushing things a little bit in terms of public space” – but most of them were captured across two evenings at AUTOFOTO Studio in London Fields, where the and his subjects had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. “Having that studio definitely gave me more of a safe space for people to come and be more free and open” to whatever they wanted to do. As such, many of the images in the project are quite explicitly erotic.

For Raptor, unabashed nudity is a way of better capturing his subjects. “I feel like people bear a little bit more of themselves and discover something new about themselves when they’re not fully clothed, even though they are in some of the images. I just like that freedom that comes with the nude,” he says. “There’s one model who I first met before they transitioned, and when they’re in the booth it’s after they transitioned – seeing that evolution was pretty amazing.” /STRIPPED/ shows that, a century on from its invention, the photobooth remains an alluring, potent site of pleasure and self-invention.