Customers stand inside of Pikchi Photobooth on the Lower East Side on Dec. 7, 2025. (Credit: Jasmine Venet)
Between rows of Korean snacks, kitchen appliances and boxes of hair dye, a group of young women fixed each other’s hair and checked their makeup on their phones under a shimmering disco ball hanging from the ceiling of H Mart in New York City’s Koreatown. There wasn’t a shopping basket in sight.
It was a Friday night in December, and these women weren’t gathered at the Asian supermarket to run errands. Instead, they looked to make memories among the aisles of produce at one of the store’s most recent additions: two Korean-style photo booths.
These aren’t your run-of-the-mill, old-school photo booths. Hidden behind a black privacy curtain, the first booth is decorated to look like an old manual elevator, with the camera positioned in a corner of the ceiling. The second is a more common Korean photo booth format, consisting of a pink background and a touch screen where guests can customize their photos with filters and borders.
Among the short line of women waiting for their turn in the H Mart photo booths, Yoon Joo Cho, 23, peered at the hundreds of photo strips taped to the side of the booths, trying to get inspiration for her upcoming photo session with her friends.
“I never know which poses to do,” she lamented as she pointed out a few potential contenders to her friend, who nodded in agreement.
Cho grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and remembers going to photo booths with her friends whenever she wasn’t at school or locked away in a “hagwon,” a cram school that most South Korean children attend after school till late into the night.
Back then, photo booths were located on the street, typically in trendy neighborhoods or near cafes. She says that the most interesting part of these booths was being able to choose virtual stickers to place on her photos.
Cho relished the $3 high of making a small memory with her friends that she could later hang up on her wall.
“I’ve probably been to a thousand photo booths at this point,” Cho said.
Now, the 23-year-old gets to revisit one of her favorite childhood activities for $6—“because it’s trendy it keeps on getting more expensive”—in the corner of an H Mart in New York.
Over the past few years, photo booths have emerged as a popular trend among younger generations, who have become increasingly drawn to retro and physical media. Just last October, the photo booth museum AUTOPHOTO opened its first New York location in the Lower East Side, offering a selection of seven analog photo booths.
Even the most basic Korean photo booths around New York, like the ones in H Mart, are vamped-up versions of their analog predecessors.
Yet even the most basic Korean photo booths, like the ones in H Mart, are vamped-up versions of their analog predecessors.
In these photo booths, Cho is now able to choose how many photos she wants to take, apply a variety of filters to them and select cute borders around her photos before printing. They have eccentric themes, from elevators to bathrooms, and some let people take photos alongside digitally inserted pictures of their favorite K-pop idol in every frame.
Most importantly, these photo booths let customers scan a QR code at the end of each photo session to receive a digital copy of their photo strip, as well as a short video of participants striking their poses in the booth.
Cho loves being able to save her photo strips on her phone, and always posts her most recent photo-booth strips on her Instagram account. She estimates that she goes to at least one photo booth per month.
Over the past few years, photo booths have emerged as a popular trend among younger generations, many of whom are drawn to retro and physical media.
This photo booth concept was introduced by the Korean brand Life4Cuts back in 2017, when it opened its first self-service photo studio.
These studios are typically located in a small storefront with no onsite workers required, and have multiple booths for people to choose from with various themes. Their shelves are always fully stocked with funny headpieces and sunglasses, as well as curling irons and straighteners.
Life4Cuts opened its first U.S. location in 2023, and has now expanded to 10 stores around the country. It opened its first New York location last January.
Since then, around a dozen other new photo booths have popped up around the city. A few of them have adopted some of Life4Cuts’ key features, like fun props and themes, and almost all of them include a QR code to download photos and videos.
One such studio is Pikchi Photobooth on the Lower East Side, which opened in September. Similarly to Life4Cuts, it’s made up of three different themed photo booths—one is made to look like the inside of an elevator and another like the inside of a grocery store—and provides a variety of headpieces for people to wear and stickers to decorate their photo strips.
Himani Kongara, 19, and her friend Aashritha Paluru, 18, stopped by Pikchi Photobooth while on a day trip to New York from Virginia in January. This was Kongara’s second time at the photo studio, and she loves having both a digital and physical copy of her photos which she can put in her scrapbooks.
Pikchi Photobooth can also turn people’s photo strips into keychains, and Kongara and Paluru walked out of the studio with two new keychains in hand.
“There’s photo booths everywhere now, but you can’t get a keychain everywhere,” Kongara said.
Just one street up from Pikchi Photobooth is the photo studio SomethingSoft, which opened in August. It, too, has several photo booths with different themes and a QR code to scan for digital copies of the photos.
SomethingSoft, and other photo booths like it, invites social media influencers to its booths to take photos and post their digital photo strips on their accounts. This allows them to market themselves to younger people on apps like Instagram and TikTok.
Anida Mak, 21, and Maggie Jiang, 18, both came across SomethingSoft on TikTok, and decided to brave the early January rain to take some photos together.
Mak said she usually hangs her photo strips on her refrigerator, while Jiang likes to hang them up on her wall. However, whether or not they’ll post the digital copies on their Instagram accounts is another story entirely.
“If they come out good, they’ll go on Instagram. If they don’t come out good, it’s just for the memories,” Jiang said.
Nadiah Jamaludin, 23, visited the SomethingSoft photo booth back in November. Originally from Malaysia, where jean shorts and tank tops were her daily uniform, Jamaludin decided to brave the crisp autumn evening, equipped with a thick scarf and parka, for the sake of snapping some photos with her friends. She much prefers the experience of taking pictures in a photo booth than on her phone.
“Everyone is always on their phone, taking pictures on their phone, so this is just a more fun and special way to do that,” Jamaludin said.
“And anyways, you can still get them on your phone, so you’re not actually missing out,” she adds with a shrug.
Back in H Mart, the crowd gathered around the photo booths showed no signs of dying down, as more people filed into the store to shelter from the cold as they waited their turn.
Cho and her friend emerged giggling from one of the photo booths and back into the aisles of Asian snacks and produce. They held out their freshly printed photo strips in front of them and snapped a few pictures of the strips on their phones.
“Just to have options,” Cho said, already beginning to draft her upcoming Instagram post in her head.
About the author(s)
Jasmine Venet is an M.S. student at the Columbia School of Journalism.