Alan Adler

Alan Adler (30 May 1932 – 18 December 2024) was an Australian man who owned 16 photo booths across Melbourne, Australia. Over his career, he took photographs of himself each time he fixed and serviced the booths for over 50 years, keeping thousands of the test strips in his home, though he did not consider himself a photographer.

By the year of his retirement in 2022, only one of his booths remained, at Flinders Street railway station; the operation of this booth and the potential restoration of the rest was taken over by Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman under the name Metro-Auto-Photo. Adler's work has been celebrated by a book and exhibition, both by the same name of Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits.

Early life Adler was born on 30 May 1932. He disliked photography in school, "because it was in the dark all the time".

Career In 1972, He owned a small self-serving grocery store on Burwood Road in Hawthorn, Victoria, previously his father's, which was performing poorly due to a large supermarket across the street. That year, after seeing "vending machines" His work also involved harm prevention, such as suspending the relay boxes so they swung when attacked and adding rubber stops to protect the light chutes from the doors if they were kicked open. At one point, Adler bought six or seven Prontophot booths; these booths took colour photos, though this colour faded over time.

When Adler went on holiday, he often took photos of the booths he saw as part of his research; this included photo booths in Japan, America, and Brazil. One image in his collection is from a Chuck E. Cheese photo ride. after it was delayed. Sutherland has described him as one of the most photographed men in Australia.

The exhibition aimed to reunite a collection lost photo strips, of which 250 were unclaimed, to their subjects, with this initiative extending after the end of the exhibition. Sutherland and Norman plan to get the 16 photobooths back up and running across Melbourne. They post images from the Flinders Street Station booth on Instagram.

Personal life Adler had a wife, Lorraine, and two children, Cate and Damon Adler.

Norman has described Adler as "a man on an island, physically and mentally. I mean, he’s quite a solitary person. He does know the industry, and has friends in it, but he drove around all day servicing machines for decades. He spent a lot of his time just by himself, basically."