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Fotomat (date unknown)
(lemmy.nz)
Fotomat was a chain of drive-up film developing kiosks. You would drop off your negatives, and pick up pictures the next day. They were eventually overtaken by one hour photo labs in the 1980s and went out of business. Some of the structures have been repurposed to sell coffee or other products, but most are gone.
Here is an undated photo of one. Maybe late 60s / early-mid 70s, from the cars?
I used to work in the photo department at a store, that was genuinely a pretty fun job. I got to see some fun and weird and cool shit.
You have to look at every picture for legal and picture alignment/color reasons, and my favorite thing was just how often I’d be going through regular stuff, birthday party, barbecue, the usuals, then BAM one picture of dad naked in the mirror, full dong, then right back to the standard affair. I always tried to make a note of who picked up those pictures, and more often than not it wasn’t the dude in the photo, and I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall for those moments of discovery.
Are you Robin Williams?
They were tied to the job, sure, but no, I was murdering people that had their pictures developed by me for entirely different reasons than in One Hour Photo, the work was really the only parallel.
Sy the Photo Guy!
*Haunting movie (One Hour Photo, 2002), worth watching fyi