Framed or unframed, desk size to sofa size, printed by us in Arizona and Alabama since 2007. Explore now.
Shorpy is funded by you. Patreon contributors get an ad-free experience.
Learn more.
Bedford, Massachusetts, circa 1978. The end is near for this kiosk and many like them across the country. After the demise it turned into a video rental store; now it is gone. It was in the Bedford Plaza. All gone now. Taken on Ektachrome 35mm film. View full size.
I was a Fotomat Fotomate just a year before this! I had worked hard to train for it, and it was a pretty good job, overall. I had only worked there for a few months, though, when my husband graduated from college at BYU and we had to move to Lexington, Kentucky for grad school. Unfortunately, there was no Fotomat there. Only two years later, when we returned to Utah, Fotomat was just going under. I heard that the creator of it ran off with his secretary and the investor's money, or something on that order.
I thought the film was fine, and the service generally was, too. Sometimes, things were late coming back and people would yell at me, like they thought I had a darkroom in that little 6X6 building, and did the developing myself! There were dozens of imitators, for the few years that it was around. Every parking lot of any size had either a Fotomat or an imitator, for a few years, there.
On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5