It’s almost a century since the first photo-booth was unveiled on Broadway in New York, brainchild of jobbing photographer Anatol Josepho. The young Russian migrant called it the Photomaton and for 25 cents you could enter his booth, have your picture taken and, ten minutes later, be presented with eight portraits.

In its first six months that single unit serviced 280,000 people. Josepho sold the patent for $1 million in 1927 – a Socialist, he gave away half of his windfall – and a year later British financier Clarence Hatry brought the invention to the UK. Soon there were photo-booths everywhere, though in a weird footnote to the story it was Hatry’s bankruptcy in September 1929 which is thought to have caused the Wall Street Crash.

The photo-booth survived alongside the self-developing instant camera for decades. But with the advent of digital photography and the rise of the smartphone, the entirely analogue photo-booth has become a vanishingly rare artefact in the 21st century – a museum piece, or a curio sitting in a shed somewhere. Gone are the days when you would take your seat, drop in your coins, choose your curtain backdrop, endure four bright flashes as you pulled a succession of stupid faces – then wait impatiently as the machine gurgled and throbbed before spitting out a strip of images.

An original photo boothAn original photo booth (Image: free) Gone but not forgotten – and now not entirely gone either because this weekend Edinburgh photography gallery Stills unveils what will be Scotland’s only permanent working analogue photo-booth. And it’s yours for the, well, using.

The project is called the Stillsautomat and the person behind it is Caitlin Serey, Development Manager at Stills. After advice from London-based Rafael Hortala Vallve, whose Autofoto company rescues and renovates coin-operated analogue photo-booths, Serey sourced a unit in the United States. Beyond the fact that is bears the date 1995, she knows little about its provenance.

She isn’t even sure how many photo-booths may still be in existence. Nobody is. “When the photo booths started being replaced by digital ones, or they started becoming obsolete, people just started throwing them in skips,” she says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t that many analogue booths out there.”

The introduction of Stills’s booth is in part a money-making exercise for a venue which, like most in the arts sector, is struggling financially. For £7 you’ll get a strip of four, crisp black and white images. You will still have to wait for the machine to do its thing, but to kill the time there is an attraction previous generations of users never had: tiny interior cameras will display the developing and printing processes.

By revisiting one of photography’s most iconic innovations, the Stillsautomat is also celebrating the history of the medium. Everyone from John and Yoko to Jack and Jackie (Kennedy that is) have used photo-booths. Search for images of virtually any mid-20th century figure and you’ll probably find vintage shots of them in a photo-booth. There’s a great one of Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings mugging in a booth just weeks before Holly died. Or how about a louche Jack Kerouac in his US Coast Guard uniform in 1942, pointing a cigarette end at the camera?

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The photo-booth appealed to artists too. The Surrealists were big fans and for Andy Warhol they were a constant source of inspiration.

Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar editor Ruth Ansel to illustrate a feature about new faces in the arts for the June 1963 issue, Warhol took his subjects not to a studio but to a simple photo-booth. In one of the strips he shot, of musician Bobby Short, you can see an out-of-focus Warhol in the foreground, trademark sunglasses in place. The artist later made a series of nine paintings based on the images, discovered in his studio after his death.

Art collector Ethel Scull he took to a booth in Times Square and later made a series of silk-screen prints from those images. Warhol also took dozens of self-portraits in which he indulged his passion for disguise. For him it was the perfect synthesis of mass communication, popular culture and celebrity.

So although many people using photo-booths did so for purely workaday reasons – a passport application perhaps, or a driving licence renewal – for many others they were more personal. The photo-booth was where the first selfies were taken, the booth itself a curtained off space which – ironic given they were often located in mass transit hubs – offered real privacy. You can be yourself in a photo-booth. Nobody is looking and nobody is judging.

It’s point not lost on Babette Hines, author of Photobooth, a collection of hundreds of photo-booth images sourced by her and covering mostly the middle years of the 20th century. “What matters if that you are both photographer and subject,” she writes.

“Alone in the booth, you forgo the behaviours and attitudes expected when a camera is forced on you … You can be sexy or goofy or tough. You can even pretend to be happier than you really are, and you get eight (or at least four) chances to do it.”

The privacy afforded by the photo-booth also appealed to those suffering prejudice in their daily lives. “You could really like close that curtain and do anything you wanted, so it became almost a form of protest in itself,” says Ms Serey. "You had mixed race couples taking pictures in them when photographers at the time might not have done it [taken their portrait], or you had queer couples who would take pictures behind the curtain.”

A typical vintage photo booth or FotoautomaticaA typical vintage photo booth or Fotoautomatica (Image: free) On top of the history and the cultural importance of what the Stillsautomat represents, its likely popularity when it opens to the public this weekend ties in with a trend Ms Serey has observed. She sees it in those who are interested in both photography’s past and its future – particularly those younger people who have never known the pleasure of loading film into a camera and hearing the sound of a real shutter release. Who have never stood waiting for a strip of photographs to pop out of a slot.

“We’re really interested in how it might reach new audiences for us because nowadays we really are seeing a younger generation re-engage with film and analogue photography in a way that people haven’t done in a very long time. It’s really interesting to see how these analogue photo-booths are gaining so much popularity because people are going back to being interested in slower forms of photography.”

For those digital natives growing bored of posting selfies to social media, or who yearn for an image which can’t be copied or downloaded with a swipe or the right click of a mouse – non fungible, in art market parlance – the photo-booth is the perfect antidote.

“And the pictures themselves are really beautiful,” says Ms Serey finally. “They are just this one-off strip. There’s nothing else you can do with it. You can’t replicate it a million times, and I think the younger generation is really interested in having a unique photo. That’s probably nothing they’ve ever experienced in their lifetime.”

The Stillsautomat is at Stills, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, from October 19