Subscriber Carl Chiarenza asks for some commemoration of vanishing components of the Polaroid product line. In his case, he particularly mourns what he describes as “the loss of Polaroid Type 55 [film] for us b&w oldsters.” (Production of this material ceased in February 2008, so surely it’s not only “b&w oldsters” who will miss it.)
- Polaroid 55 P/N sheet film
Polaroid has begun to reinvent itself for the 21st century. As you’ll see at the company’s website, Polaroid hopes to reposition itself in the digital-imaging environment while building on its brand-name recognition and long history in the medium. More power to them, though I’m not persuaded that the cleverly named Polaroid PoGo™ Instant Mobile Printer will bring back the glory days. Do people really want the ability to “print and share” their images via “2×3-inch borderless color images in under a minute” using yet another accessory with “pocket-size, sleek, stylish design”? Seems to me vastly more photo-sharing than ever before goes on nowadays, most of it via cellphones, email, the whole digital thing. But I digress . . .
In 2004 the company sold for $426 million. In April of 2009 it re-sold for just shy of $86 million. This means it lost roughly 80 percent of its value in five years. Reconstruction from the ground up isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. Inevitably, some of its earlier products will fall by the wayside during that process — to the dismay of their dedicated users. This represents elementary free-market economics in action. Type 55 film has become one of the casualties.
For the non-photographers among this blog’s readers, Polaroid Type 55 film (also sometimes called P/N film, which stands for positive/negative) is/was a fine-grain medium-format black-and-white peel-apart film that yielded both an instant positive print and an accompanying negative (which could be used later in an enlarger, or contact-printed). One of its benefits for photographers was that you saw almost instantly what a print from your negative would look like, enabling you to make another exposure on the spot if the first test wasn’t satisfactory. Another advantage was that, when used in social situations (for example, doing street portraits in a documentary project) your subjects could see immediately how you were portraying them, and you could give them the positive as a keepsake while keeping the negative for subsequent printing. (Here’s the film’s data sheet, for the tech-oriented among you.)
Because I’m not a committed picture-maker, I don’t have personal experience with this material. So my role in the lamentation is vicarious, since this doesn’t affect my own production in any direct way. In another sense, my response to this is imaginative; as a looker at photographs, an active member of the audience for photography, I’ll miss the pictures that won’t get made because what this material enabled can’t happen anymore in quite the same way.
Here’s how I synopsized that reaction in a recent post about the discontinuance of Kodachrome: “It’s always saddening when something slips out of the toolkit of a medium. It’s one less flavor at the disposal of the artist or communicator, one less taste for the audience to savor.”
In November 2008 Art World, a Chinese magazine, ran an article whose title translates as “Goodbye, Polaroid,” about the end of the Polaroid era in analog/chemical photography. Its author, Eliza Wang, asked me to comment. Here’s my statement, expanding on the idea above:
It’s always a sad moment when something vanishes from the toolkit of the creative artist. If it simply slips into disuse due to changes in fashion or technological obsolescence, it can always be recovered and revitalized by a later generation. That has happened in photography with the daguerreotype, the tintype, platinum and albumen printing, and numerous other techniques. But when a tool, material, or process disappears because its sole manufacturer discontinues production or goes out of business, there’s little likelihood of its reappearance — especially if the underlying technology involves patents and proprietary formulas, as in the case of Polaroid.
Digital photography supplanted the “instant” aspect of the Polaroid image, surpassing it in speed, while also enabling the immediate sharing of the image with the subjects. Picture-makers who employed Polaroid processes will miss, most of all, the physicality of Polaroid’s various forms of output in color. Only Polaroid enables certain procedures not intended by the inventors but discovered by photographers: the manipulation of the fresh emulsion in the SX-70 (Lucas Samaras, Les Krims) and the 20×24 (Ellen Brooks), the transfer of that emulsion to a different substrate (Elizabeth Opalenik). Entire bodies of work have been built on these options, which will soon be foreclosed.
Of course it’s possible that someone will devise Photoshop versions of these techniques, making possible the digital imitation of these effects. Conceivably, if demand is sufficient and the licenses are available, production of one or more forms of Polaroid output may revive as a small-scale “boutique” industry. Even so, saying goodbye to Polaroid symbolizes the end of an era in photography.
I’ve uploaded a 1998 article I published originally in the Danish journal Katalog, “Polaroid: What Price Largesse?” This essay reconsiders a 1980 essay of mine; in both I ponder the Polaroid Corporation’s patronage — its effect on the field and on the work produced under such sponsorship.
While some of the analog Polaroid materials have vanished, or will do so shortly, they may well persist in our lens culture in the form of digital ersatz — by which I mean that a faux-Polaroid “Polaroid look” will doubtless endure.
I remain surprised that Adobe has not offered a “Polaroid transfer effect” on its Photoshop pull-down menus; I suspect we’ll see that sometime soon. Meanwhile, here’s a workaround tutorial of sorts for that, “Simulate the Polaroid transfer effect, digitally,” adapted from the book Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills, by Mark Galer and Philip Andrews.
And if you miss the distinctive qualities of the SX-70, consider downloading the free app Poladroid. Drag and drop any digital-image file into this and you’ll generate a digital version of an SX-70, complete with a simulation of its little paper/plastic frame.
Finally, for “the biggest Polaroid-picture-collection of the planet to celebrate the magic of instant photography” — a vast trove of Polaroid images, most of it vernacular photography — go to Polanoid.net. As of this writing they’ve gone over the 200,000-image mark in this online archive.
I invite comments on Polaroid from all. Because this isn’t a blog directed particularly at photographers, I recommend taking the more technical aspect of the discussion to a blog such as Mike Johnston’s excellent The Online Photographer. What would interest me, and I think many of this blog’s readers, would be an indication of how you integrated one or another vanished Polaroid tool or material into your creative process and production, how it affected your image-making and your imagery, and what its disappearance will mean — how that will change your work, especially if digital tools or other options can’t substitute for what’s lost.
— A. D. Coleman
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Excellent article. I still have a bit of 55 that I’ve been saving.
Don’t forget about “The Impossible Project,” though. They’re trying to reverse-engineer the process to restart production in Europe. They’re clearly very serious — they’ve acquired the old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands just for the purpose.
Rather than kill these things completely, I hope it’s possible the right “niche” business model could turn these types of materials profitable again.
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Thanks to Jonathan Day-Reiner for bringing this link, and The Impossible Project, into this discussion. I hadn’t heard about them till now, and I’m sure other readers of this blog hadn’t either. This represents exactly the kind of grass-roots energy that can keep discontinued analog/chemical/”wet” processes alive and available to micro-markets after they prove themselves no longer viable as mass-market consumer forms.
The photographic vocabulary has lost a few more adjectives.
We often speak of photography in linguistic terms. There is a language implicit in the use of photographic tools. We create statements of the abstract from photographic tools that should have just given us an exact representation of the world. We have the plastic camera with its light streaks and focus defects; the pinhole with its softer focus and exaggerated depth of field; and several Polaroid processes which each offered their own unique expressions.
While Type 55 was a more literal expression than some in the Polaroid toolbox, it offered its own subtleties. Type 55 was notoriously delicate. Images made with the film often had scratches and abrasions and the thin emulsion created photos with a unique look. Many artists working with the film also printed in oversized carriers, showing the pattern of round dots on one end and a border that was similar to the Polaroid transfer process.
As we see the vocabulary of photography diminished by each loss, we can try to create the same ‘words’ using Photoshop, but as I have been finding out myself, something is often lost in the translation. A Photoshop version is still a description of something in the world that might have benefited from the unpredictability of the Polaroid films. We can create scratches and peel-off and emulsion smudges that we know from experience that Polaroid films might have made, but they will never be as wild and unexpected as the ones we would have seen with the actual material.
All of us who have used these films over the years (I have used Polaroid seriously since 1979. The first photograph I ever made was taken with a Polaroid Swinger.) hope that someone will be able to revive them. On the other hand, there is no going back.
I have been teaching students how to do alternative process photography for nearly 10 years. During that entire time I have been telling them that someday they would have to make their own materials to continue doing analog photography. As photography becomes more and more a digital pursuit, it is the hope of old-timers like me that the next generations of photographers will want to rediscover what we found to be so magical.
Photoshop can do wonderful things, but there is truly something magical about making photographs with your hands. The smell of fixer, the feeling on wet paper in your hands and the sensation of watching something you created drying and curling and coming to life right before your eyes –- a whole image, not rows upon rows of dots of toner.
After more than 170 years, the flame of analog photography is flickering. The world will lose something precious if we let it go out entirely.
Thanks, A.D., for the mention. 🙂
Thomas, I agree in many ways.
With traditional processes it’s becoming less about shooting and passing off to a lab and more about treating photography as a craft. For many of those rediscovering film, it’s not just about the final image, but the process and the very singular experience that accompanies it.
It’s an entirely different experience when you guide the process organically from start to finish — there is a tactile element to working with traditional materials that just can’t be replicated with a DSLR and a mouse. It’s this hands-on, often contemplative facet that (among other factors) keeps drawing people to analog, and will keep film around for quite some time yet, I think.
p.s. There is hope for future film lovers: just look on flickr or twitter and you will find lots of young people (under 30) shooting with and embracing traditional materials. I’m (I hope I can say only) 33 and I shoot film almost exclusively, much of it 4×5 at that.
Let me add another reason for (cautious) hope to Jonathan Day-Reiner‘s comments about the appeal of analog processes for users.
Notably, as the everyday, functional usages of the medium have moved inexorably toward the digital end of the spectrum, the market for creative work produced via the earlier chemical/”wet” processes has expanded and stabilized.
The audience for creative photography (broadly defined) grows exponentially. The informed component of that audience — what Minor White used to call the “educated audience,” those who, while not picture-makers themselves, know something of the medium’s history and understand something about what goes into the making of a fine print of a resonant image — expands as well. That audience has an increasing awareness of the photograph as a crafted object, and a proven appetite for a diversity of physical forms of photography. It’s from that educated audience that the already substantial collector base for photographs comes.
Neither the demand by producers of images nor the interests of collectors of images can guarantee that it’s economically feasible to sustain production of a given photographic material. But, given a setting in which you have artisans at one end in need of tools and materials to create a particular line of goods and identifiable potential purchasers for those goods at the other end, the elements are in place for a healthy micro-market that could support production of the tools and materials involved.
Please don’t forget our efforts, Allan. 20×24 lives!
John Reuter’s right, of course. Not all of the Polaroid processes have vanished. Check out the website/blog of the 20×24 Studio: Where Large-Format Polaroid Photography Lives.
Their press release, dated today, July 9, 2009, starts off, “20×24 Holdings LLC and Polaroid Corporation have recentlycompleted an agreement to transfer the studio and production assets for Polaroid 20×24 film to 20×24 Holdings LLC. This private company, headed by John Reuter will continue to offer access to the incredible analog technology of large format instant film by way of camera and studio rental as well as film sales to independent owners of 20×24 cameras.”
The 20×24 was always an experiment for Polaroid, and I suspect it was somewhere between a loss-leader, a showcase, and a labor of love for the corporation; hard to imagine it ever made them enough to cover their development, patenting, production, maintenance, and materials costs. Still, here we have another example of how a microbrew operation like 20×24 Studio can step in to service a market and keep a picture-making technology alive when a major manufacturer can no longer justify keeping it in the product line.
Photocritic International wishes John and his accomplices the very best of luck with this venture.
By the way, Polaroid also made a 40″-wide peel-apart color film/paper combination that got used by its 40×80 camera. Basically, this camera was a room with a hole in the wall and a lens in the hole, with a vacuum easel behind it holding the paper in place. Just about any room could be adapted as the “camera obscura” for this tool. Here’s a link to a commentary by Stanley Rowin, who observed on in operation at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. I’m not clear on whether production of the 40×80 film will continue. PI would welcome a comment on that subject from someone knowledgeable.
It wasn’t so much that Polaroid couldn’t keep us in their product line, but that Polaroid was ordained to set in motion an exit from film production by its “owner,” Petters International. There can be great debate as to whether or not film production could have been successfully scaled down to a level that could be profitable at current market demand; we will never know.
One can argue that 20×24 was a loss leader. We never lost money in the structure we operated in, but we certainly contributed to the Polaroid brand. I did what I had to do to keep this alive within Polaroid’s evolving structure. The survival of the medium now creates great challenges, as I must now replicate an infrastructure that was part of a huge manufacturing effort. It is certainly more complicated, but I would hope that most would agree that it is worth the effort.
That’s excellent news, John. ULF materials may be a “niche within a niche,” but their very uniqueness makes their loss even more sad. It’s great to hear such a unique material will get a new lease on life c/o your studio.
A.D., just as a minor footnote to all of this, today’s Houston Chronicle has an article in its lifestyle section about a growing resurgence of Polaroid use among teenagers:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/6063073.html
Regarding faux Polaroid transfer, I created a podcast in 2006 on how to do this. It can be found at my podcast site: http://www.johnreuter.libsyn.com.
Direct link would be: http://cdn1.libsyn.com/johnreuter/Edge_Effects_Two_Image_Transfer2b.mov?nvb=20090717020621&nva=20090718021621&t=026296b72919ff0456c98
40×80 production will not continue.
The process was owned by Gregory Colbert, who for years produced 40×80 Image Transfers without identifying them as such. His exhibit “Ashes and Snow” was all Polaroid transfers. The remaining negative purchased for 40×80 was slit to 22 inches two years ago. Colbert now prints his images with an 84-inch Roland printer. Polaroid’s New Bedford plant that coated that negative four years ago is now gone.
I would like to add another element to the discussion: the Polaroid Education Program. This program was directed at K-12 teachers on the use of photography — the Polaroid camera and film — in the classroom. I was a curriculum developer and teacher in the program. Teachers, for $10.00, would receive a camera at the workshop. The workshop itself was free.
There were a lot of good curriculum materials developed for general and specific curricular areas. I have a number of these books back in my US office. Yes, it was a marketing plan, but it also introduced teachers to the use of images/photography in their day-to-day teaching.
Early in the ’90s the project refused to consider digital camera/images because the program was built upon the use of the camera, which meant film.
Here in Enschede, NL, where I now live part-time, there was a Polaroid plant. The plant closed a number of years ago. Recently some folks here have attempted to bring back the camera for use in creative ways. When I have time I will check up on this.
Here’s a sweet, well-written eulogy (perhaps premature) for the SX-70, from the July 17, 2009 issue of Newsweek: “Instant Karma,” by Andrew Romano.
This essay has, as an accompaniment to its online version, “On Polaroid,” a slideshow portfolio from various photographers who used Polaroid film, captioned with commentaries : Chuck Close, Barbara Crane, David Levinthal, Mary Ellen Mark, José Picayo, more.
And, while you’re at it, take a look at the Save Polaroid website.
Thanks to reader Ângela Márcia dos Santos for bringing this recent Time magazine story to my attention: “After Polaroid, Keeping Instant Photography Alive” by Henning Hoff, from the issue of Tuesday, July 21, 2009. It summarizes the Impossible Project, brainchild of Florian Kaps and André Bosman, who hope to revive the production of SX-70 film (and perhaps other Polaroid films and cameras as well) in the city of Enschede, the Netherlands.
It strikes me as notable that this article has appeared not in a photo magazine but in Time, surely one of the largest-circulation general-audience English-language news magazines in the world. Photography is a cultural phenomenon, and at least some of what happens in the medium — including even some technological developments — have resonance in the larger cultural arena.
That’s why this blog has opened up discussion of various aspects of Polaroid’s past and present history. This represents one of those points where visual culture, and specifically lens culture, intersects with the concerns of the citizenry as a whole. If Time feels its readership needs to know about this, it’s not just a photo-specific issue anymore.
Here’s a Viennese gallery, Polanoir, selling nothing but original Polaroids and large, limited-edition lambda prints made from Polaroids. Talk about specialized . . .
Lengthy, detailed, solid story from the August 14, 2009 Financial Times about the Impossible Project and its effort to reinvent SX-70 film and begin producing it on a boutique/microbrew basis in the Netherlands.