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![\"Polaroid](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/PR085_lg_v2_m565775698304750514.jpg\" "\\"PR085_lg_v2_m56577569830475051\\"")
<\/dt>\n- Polaroid 55 P\/N sheet film<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n
Polaroid has begun to reinvent itself for the 21st century. As you’ll see at\u00a0the company’s website<\/a>, 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\u2122 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 . . .<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 to the dismay of their dedicated users. This represents elementary free-market economics in action. Type 55 film has become one of the casualties.<\/p>\n
For the non-photographers among this blog’s readers, Polaroid Type 55 film<\/a> (also sometimes called P\/N film, which stands for positive\/negative) is\/was a fine-grain medium-format black-and-white peel-apart\u00a0film 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<\/a>, for the tech-oriented among you.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here’s how I synopsized that reaction in a recent post about the discontinuance of Kodachrome<\/a>: “It\u2019s always saddening when something slips out of the toolkit of a medium. It\u2019s one less flavor at the disposal of the artist or communicator, one less taste for the audience to savor.”<\/p>\n
In November 2008 Art World<\/em>,\u00a0a Chinese magazine, ran an article whose title translates as\u00a0“Goodbye, Polaroid,” about the end of the Polaroid era in analog\/chemical photography.\u00a0Its author, Eliza Wang,\u00a0asked me to comment. Here’s my statement, expanding on the idea above:<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 especially if the underlying technology involves patents and proprietary formulas, as in the case of Polaroid.<\/em><\/p>\n
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.<\/em><\/p>\n
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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
![\"KATALOG](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/KATALOG-10.2-cover5-225x300.jpg\" "\\"KATALOG")
I’ve uploaded a 1998 article I published originally in the Danish journal Katalog<\/em>, “Polaroid: What Price Largesse?”<\/a> This essay reconsiders a 1980 essay of mine; in both I ponder the Polaroid Corporation’s patronage \u2014\u00a0its effect on the field and on the work produced under such sponsorship.<\/p>\nWhile 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 \u2014 by which I mean that a faux-Polaroid “Polaroid look” will doubtless endure.<\/p>\n
I remain surprised that Adobe has not offered a “Polaroid transfer effect” on its Photoshop\u00a0pull-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,”<\/a> adapted from the book Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills<\/em>, by Mark Galer and Philip Andrews.<\/p>\n
![\"logo-poladroid-1\"](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/logo-poladroid-14-300x70.jpg\" "\\"logo-poladroid-1\\"")
<\/a>And if you miss the distinctive qualities of the SX-70, consider downloading the free app Poladroid<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\nFinally, for “the biggest Polaroid-picture-collection of the planet to celebrate the magic of instant photography”\u00a0\u2014 a vast trove of Polaroid images, most of it vernacular photography \u2014\u00a0go to Polanoid.net<\/a>. As of this writing they’ve gone over the 200,000-image mark in this online archive.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0to a blog such as Mike Johnston’s excellent The Online Photographer<\/a>. 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 \u2014 how that will change your work, especially if digital tools or other options can’t substitute for what’s lost.<\/p>\n
\u2014 A. D. Coleman<\/p>\n
- For a discussion of\u00a0the Polaroid Artist Support Programs<\/a>, click on this link.<\/li>\n
- For a discussion of\u00a0the status of the Polaroid collections<\/a>, click on this link.<\/li>\n
- For a discussion of\u00a0the Polaroid Education Program<\/a>, click on this link.<\/li>\n
\u2022<\/p>\n
- For a discussion of\u00a0the Polaroid Artist Support Programs<\/a>, click on this link.<\/li>\n