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What used to be considered immediate gratification now feels, in the era of digital film, like a slow lifecycle in miniature.
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It takes 90 seconds for a Polaroid to develop. Products, from potted plants to picture frames to hand mirrors from Atypyk and Colin O’Dowd. Applications like Poladroid or dozens of Photoshop tutorials make it easy to re-create the act of slipping a white frame on any picture, and industrial designers have paid winking homage in “Polaroid-frame” There’s simply a different kind of seeing taking place. Even the frame’s milky color suggests a sustaining, wholesome thing, like baby teeth. It’s a built-in caption site that takes Sharpie ink particularly well. It’s a safe spot for your fingertips as you watch the image swim intofocus. Start with 1) the iconic frame, which is brilliant in several ways. And sites such as Save Polaroid keep fans updated on the film’s status and related cultural events.īut back to the original question: What is the appeal of Polaroid? The answer lies in five contradictory, maddeningly engaging charms.
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Individual photographers are hosting their own shows, such as The Instant, and have been making their case for continued relevance (see Porter Hovey’s Polaroid Project). Taschen’s The Polaroid Book sells briskly next to Polaroid notecards at Urban Outfitters, which has invested in The Impossible Project as well. Meanwhile, Polanoir galleries in Barcelona, Vienna, and Berlin display all Polaroid art, all the time. Going through December 12, New York’s Danziger Projects is hosting Greatness: Andy Warhol Polaroids of Sports Champions Pump House Gallery in South London is hosting Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid, ending December 13 and London’s Atlas Gallery has extended its Polaroid retrospective twice (now open until January 16). The film’s rescue from destruction has been aided by many public displays of affection. And Polaroid’s new brand licensees, the Summit Global Group, have announced they will reproduce several classic Polaroid cameras, all using film made by The Impossible Project. The Project’s first black and-white film will hit the market in early 2010 color film will follow in summer 2010. Second, the company itself bedeviled the duo with difficulties even as it was slowly waking to the business opportunity being squandered, as Wired UK writer Mic Wright explains in “ The Impossible Project: Bringing Back Polaroid.” Bosman and Kaps bought some scrap machinery and the entire back-stock of Polaroid instant film (still for sale via ) and promised Polaroid they would not reproduce the original film but reinvent their own version. Two obstacles stood in their way: first, the ingredients necessary to make the original film were scarce. A living anachronism, maybe, but certainly living. In 2008 alone, 24 million instant-film packets were sold around the globe, feeding an estimated one billion working Polaroid cameras worldwide. Bosman and Kaps sensed the truth Polaroid management had missed: Sales may have declined with the rise of digital cameras, but the antiquated film sold steadily to a cultishly devoted base that, the two men argued, more than justified the manufacturing costs. The Polaroid employee tasked with this dissolution, André Bosman, met Austrian entrepreneur Florian Kaps, founder of the fan community Polanoid and together they began The Impossible Project, an initiative to save Polaroid instant film from extinction. Undeterred, the company continued with plans to dismantle its chief instant-film plant in Enschede, Holland. In 2004, the company stopped producing the negatives needed to create its instant film, and four years later, the company’s materials supply was running dangerously short of demand. Polaroid’s brush with extinction started in 2001 when, nearing bankruptcy, the company was restructured by various investment firms known for selling off valuable assets from failed brands.Ĭuriously, the instant film didn’t count as one of those assets and was consigned to the scrap- heap. What makes us love Polaroid so hard? Is it the way that straydetails and furtive glances always seem to catch the lens’ focus, the way nothing looksaccidental? Is it theway thatthose first pale colors appear, arriving both fresh and old before deepening,tunneling backwards? Is it the shaking-pointless, by the way-to make the picturedry faster, develop more fully? The way life inside a Polaroid looks unaccountably warm and safe, in a way no one could ever reasonably expect?