The kiosk sat in the middle of the Tesco carpark like a planning mistake. Yellow signage, sloped roof, room enough for two staff and a counter. You handed over a film canister, took a paper envelope with a pre-printed number on it, and walked off to do the weekly shop. By the time you got back to the car, your photographs already belonged to a future you weren't part of yet.

Snappy Snaps opened its first store in 1983. Don Kennedy and Tim MacAndrews put a one-hour minilab inside a small shopfront and built a franchise on it. In August 1986 SupaSnaps was running a test market in sixty-one of its shops across Scotland and the North-East for a new service called PhotoVideo, which transferred your prints onto VHS tape. KLICK Photopoint shows up in the Cambridge Yellow Pages from 1995 through 1998, then disappears. The American precursor, Fotomat, peaked at over four thousand kiosks around 1980, distinctive pyramid roofs in gold paint, and was already in decline by the time most British versions launched. Minilab technology had collapsed the wait from a fortnight to an hour, which everyone said was the future, and which mostly meant the kiosk was no longer the kiosk for very long.

What I remember is the envelope. Manilla paper, bordered red and yellow, your name biroed onto a perforated stub. The negatives came back in a strip protector you were warned not to touch. Twenty-four exposures, sometimes thirty-six. Six or seven of them blurred. Two with a thumb in the corner. One where you had closed your eyes. The processing was a kind of judgement.

Before the minilab arrived in the carpark, the wait was longer. A week, sometimes two, and during that week the photographs lived in some intermediate state nobody could see. The trip itself was already in past tense by the time the prints came home. You held a Saturday in your hand on a Friday two weekends later. The smile in the print was a smile you no longer remembered making.

This, I think, is what the kiosk was actually for. Not the prints, but the wait. The deliberate space between making the picture and seeing it, into which other things could move.

The phone, now, gives you the photograph before you have finished taking it. The image arrives faster than the moment can settle. You see yourself reacting, and you correct, and the version that survives is the version that has already been edited by the act of seeing. There is no week in which the picture quietly becomes a different thing. There is no Friday on which you discover what last Saturday looked like. The intermediate state has been deleted.

The Rutherglen branch is long gone. Most of the British high-street kiosks are gone. The pyramid huts in American carparks have mostly been turned into drive-through coffee stalls. The infrastructure of the wait, all of it, has been recommissioned as the infrastructure of the immediate. Coffee instead of negatives. A six-minute queue instead of a six-day one.

Some of the kiosks themselves are still there, though, sitting empty between the parking bays. A small flat-roofed cabin, just big enough for two people and a counter, a window where the till used to be. They look exactly like what they are, which is the place you used to go to find out who you had been.

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