Chris was at film school at the time at the time of meeting Alan, and he was naturally inspired to pursue a short film documenting his anonymous work, fascinated by all he did to keep these chemical photobooths across the city alive. “The short film grew over five years as we kept documenting Alan and his late wife Lorraine’s story and Chris started becoming Alan’s apprentice in a way, just by showing up every time he visited the booth to learn through him,” Jessie explains. “After five years of building a relationship with a pretty reserved man in his 90s, meeting his family and a couple of health scares, he realised we weren’t going anywhere and agreed to sell us his remaining photobooths when he retired.”

From one preservation project to another, the pair have now dedicated their life’s work and first photobook to Alan’s legacy. Uncovering his countless test strips in “shoe boxes, photobooth parts or in the bottom of machines in piles of dirt that have sat in a garage for over 20 years” during the original film’s making, Chris and Jessie had the idea to bring together every test strip Alan has ever taken in his 50-year career as a photo operator into one 256 page publication. The result? An incidental archive of a largely unchanged photographic format across the ages, but every single shade of one man’s life.