This photobook chronicles the story of the most photographed person in Australia

On their very first date, Melbourne-based creatives Jessie Norman and Chris Sutherland decided to visit the city’s famous Finders Street photobooth. It was a place both were fond of and had frequented for many years, capturing memories with friends and loved ones. “Since the date was going so well,” says Jessie “we thought why not squeeze in next to each other and steal a kiss.” But when the pair got to the booth they were met with a small, handwritten note asking people to make the most of the machine in its final days, before it was due to be removed for renovations at the station. “A message that saw our lives change forever,” shares Jessie, it also sparked the idea for their recent photobook, Autophoto: A Life in Portraits.

In a bid to drum up support to save the old photo automat machine – a landmark that had become part of the furniture in Melbourne – Chris met up with the man behind the machine’s maintenance: Alan Adler. Chris took Alan’s portrait and posted it online in amongst others at a loss about the news. Eventually, the pair managed to play a part in the Finders Street machine being relocated and not scrapped altogether.

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.

With no years, decades or notes attached to any of the images uncovered, bringing together the book was “purely guess work of Alan’s ages through his hair styles or clothing”, explains Chris. “But he is rather frugal so the clothes barely changed between decades and he didn’t seem to age from 40-60 so it was no easy task — maybe the most difficult game of Guess Who ever!”

Curated (as best as they could) chronologically, the book’s design “zooms in and out” of Alan’s collection of test strips, highlighting some of the slideshow’s funniest strips over the years, including everything from his kids to his cats entering frames with few words in between. “We wanted it to transcend language, so you can visually see this man ageing in your hands and you can see someone’s life’s work and journey between pages,” says Chris.

From the moment the pair uncovered Alan’s images, Chris saw the fragments of time across hundreds of photostrips to be “one of the most unique collections of photos to exist of anyone alive today”, and he pictured them in a gallery show or photobook some day. Now realising their dream, the book (published by Perimeter Books and the Centre of Contemporary Photography, and designed by Clayton Walker) has been released to precede an exhibition of the project planned for May 2025 at the RMIT gallery in Melbourne.

“The book is really a thank you from us and generations of customers, to celebrate the ironically ‘faceless’ man behind the curtain that, prior to social media, was a thankless job where you dealt only with complaints,” Jessie concludes. “It celebrates his dedication over the years. We wanted to celebrate him — the man behind the machines.”