The Polaroid: Imperfect, Yet Magical
Via; South Willard
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: December 27, 2008
The next few months will end an era that began six decades ago with a contraption called the Model 95 camera. That accordion-style machine delivered instant photography at a price tag equivalent to some $850 today. The SX-70, which spit out color prints, arrived in 1972. American life during the late 20th century had found its Boswell.
The demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras has been coming for years. Digital technology did it in. The decision this year by the company that Edwin Land founded to stop manufacturing the film has left devotees who grew up with Polaroid’s palm-size white-bordered prints bereft. They have signed up in the thousands as members of
SavePolaroid.com. Digital cameras that print instant pictures have materialized to fill the void, providing a practical substitute. But as in most affairs of the heart, logic is beside the point.
Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroid’s leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots. A friend the other day also complained about how Polaroids often came out yellow and, when left on the rainy porch or stuck onto the refrigerator door along with the shopping lists and report cards, ended up faded and curled.
All true. One is reminded of the pragmatists’ disdain for long-playing records when compact disks arrived. Then D.J.’s and audiophiles revived LPs, in part precisely for the virtues of its inconvenience.
That is to say, LPs, like Polaroids, entailed certain obligating rituals. Igor Stravinsky near the end of his life spent evenings confined to a chair. He listened often to Beethoven. His assistant, Robert Craft, would cue the records up, then, when one side was finished, rise from his seat, carefully flip the vinyl disk over, place the needle at the beginning, and rejoin the composer, a simple act of devotion required by the limits of LP technology, endlessly repeated until it became a routine binding Stravinsky and Craft like father and son.
I can still picture my own father with his Polaroid camera. “Cheese,” he would actually say, and the machine would whir before expelling a print with the negative still attached, requiring the shutterbug to wait a prescribed time before peeling it off. My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon’s delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal — well, who knew what.
Because that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.
Or maybe not. Digital technology now excuses our mistakes all too easily — the blurry shot of Aunt Ruth fumbling with a 3-wood at the driving range; or the one of Cousin Jeff on graduation day where a flying Frisbee blocked the view of his face; or of Seth in his plaid jacket heading to his first social, the image blanched by the headlight of Burt’s car coming up the driveway; or the pictures of you beside the Christmas tree where your hair is a mess.
Digital cameras let us do away with whatever we decide is not quite right, and so delete the mishaps that not too often but once in a blue moon creep onto film and that we appreciate only later as accidental masterpieces. In fact, the new technology may be not more convenient but less than Polaroid instant film cameras were, considering the printers and wires and other electronic gadgets now required, but at this one thing, the act of destruction, a source of unthinking popularity in our era of forgetfulness and extreme makeovers, digital performs all too well. Polaroids, reflecting our imperfectability, reminded us by contrast of our humanity.
Glossy talismans in unreal colors, as ephemeral as breath on glass, they wreaked all the more havoc with our emotions for being so unassuming and commonplace. One of history’s least dewy-eyed photographers, Walker Evans spent his last years snapping some 2,500 Polaroids. During the early 1970s, to help introduce its product, Polaroid doled out SX-70s with unlimited film to a few prominent photographers, Evans among them.
He was having trouble wielding bigger cameras by then, and, clunky though it could be, the SX-70 gave him a fresh lease on life. Its point-and-shoot technology nicely dovetailed with his lean, laconic, democratic scrutiny of the world, stripping photographs down to their bare-bone essentials. It was a prosaic machine for an art about prosaic things in which, as in the camera itself, Evans found a kind of grave eloquence.
A contrarian, he also embraced its off-key colors and the fact that many other photographers didn’t take the everyman device seriously (not yet anyway). Along with some fish-eyed close-ups of pretty young women he was trying to impress, Evans composed abstract vignettes and snapped street signs that let him fool around with words and puns as he had done decades earlier and generally better. But he also shot great pictures of ready-mades, like the toothy grill of a junked pink Ford parked in a bunch of weeds, a bittersweet elegy of bygone America that in his hands stayed blessedly clear of nostalgia.
Other artists came to love Polaroids, of course. Warhol recognized it as the perfect tool to capture the gaudy, passing glamour of the disco 1970s, not to mention the genitals of visitors to the Factory, whom he apparently asked to drop their pants for posterity’s sake. (“It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t,” he reportedly said.) Conceptual artists like Vito Acconci identified with its quotidian efficiency and William Wegman made a nice career photographing Weimaraners he called Man Ray and Fay Ray. David Hockney produced Cubist collages; Chuck Close, portraits. The paradox of such a mass-market machine serving elite purposes proved irresistible to many artists and the Polaroid snapshot became a cliché in high art circles, whose diaristic potential continues to lure chroniclers of fashion like Dash Snow.
Ultimately, though, it’s the populist tradition that lends the demise of Polaroid instant film its poignancy: the power of all those ordinary pictures to salvage forgotten lives — and the finality of the moment after which the mass of billions of snapshots preserving millions of anonymous instants of happiness or private consequence ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion.
In “The Emigrants,” W. G. Sebald’s narrator by chance notices an item in a Lausanne newspaper about the discovery of a dead Alpine climber, a long-forgotten man who happened to have been very dear to someone the narrator once knew and had himself nearly forgotten. The climber’s remains were suddenly released by a glacier in Switzerland, where he had gone missing 72 years earlier.
“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes. “At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”
Or as a yellowing Polaroid snapshot we dumped into a shoebox one day long ago and forget in a corner of the attic; or clipped to the back of the sun visor in the old Buick; or that migrated behind the refrigerator, waiting to be rediscovered.
The Polaroid: Imperfect, Yet Magical
Via; South Willard
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: December 27, 2008
The next few months will end an era that began six decades ago with a contraption called the Model 95 camera. That accordion-style machine delivered instant photography at a price tag equivalent to some $850 today. The SX-70, which spit out color prints, arrived in 1972. American life during the late 20th century had found its Boswell.
The demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras has been coming for years. Digital technology did it in. The decision this year by the company that Edwin Land founded to stop manufacturing the film has left devotees who grew up with Polaroid’s palm-size white-bordered prints bereft. They have signed up in the thousands as members of SavePolaroid.com. Digital cameras that print instant pictures have materialized to fill the void, providing a practical substitute. But as in most affairs of the heart, logic is beside the point.
Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroid’s leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots. A friend the other day also complained about how Polaroids often came out yellow and, when left on the rainy porch or stuck onto the refrigerator door along with the shopping lists and report cards, ended up faded and curled.
All true. One is reminded of the pragmatists’ disdain for long-playing records when compact disks arrived. Then D.J.’s and audiophiles revived LPs, in part precisely for the virtues of its inconvenience.
That is to say, LPs, like Polaroids, entailed certain obligating rituals. Igor Stravinsky near the end of his life spent evenings confined to a chair. He listened often to Beethoven. His assistant, Robert Craft, would cue the records up, then, when one side was finished, rise from his seat, carefully flip the vinyl disk over, place the needle at the beginning, and rejoin the composer, a simple act of devotion required by the limits of LP technology, endlessly repeated until it became a routine binding Stravinsky and Craft like father and son.
I can still picture my own father with his Polaroid camera. “Cheese,” he would actually say, and the machine would whir before expelling a print with the negative still attached, requiring the shutterbug to wait a prescribed time before peeling it off. My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon’s delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal — well, who knew what.
Because that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.
Or maybe not. Digital technology now excuses our mistakes all too easily — the blurry shot of Aunt Ruth fumbling with a 3-wood at the driving range; or the one of Cousin Jeff on graduation day where a flying Frisbee blocked the view of his face; or of Seth in his plaid jacket heading to his first social, the image blanched by the headlight of Burt’s car coming up the driveway; or the pictures of you beside the Christmas tree where your hair is a mess.
Digital cameras let us do away with whatever we decide is not quite right, and so delete the mishaps that not too often but once in a blue moon creep onto film and that we appreciate only later as accidental masterpieces. In fact, the new technology may be not more convenient but less than Polaroid instant film cameras were, considering the printers and wires and other electronic gadgets now required, but at this one thing, the act of destruction, a source of unthinking popularity in our era of forgetfulness and extreme makeovers, digital performs all too well. Polaroids, reflecting our imperfectability, reminded us by contrast of our humanity.
Glossy talismans in unreal colors, as ephemeral as breath on glass, they wreaked all the more havoc with our emotions for being so unassuming and commonplace. One of history’s least dewy-eyed photographers, Walker Evans spent his last years snapping some 2,500 Polaroids. During the early 1970s, to help introduce its product, Polaroid doled out SX-70s with unlimited film to a few prominent photographers, Evans among them.
He was having trouble wielding bigger cameras by then, and, clunky though it could be, the SX-70 gave him a fresh lease on life. Its point-and-shoot technology nicely dovetailed with his lean, laconic, democratic scrutiny of the world, stripping photographs down to their bare-bone essentials. It was a prosaic machine for an art about prosaic things in which, as in the camera itself, Evans found a kind of grave eloquence.
A contrarian, he also embraced its off-key colors and the fact that many other photographers didn’t take the everyman device seriously (not yet anyway). Along with some fish-eyed close-ups of pretty young women he was trying to impress, Evans composed abstract vignettes and snapped street signs that let him fool around with words and puns as he had done decades earlier and generally better. But he also shot great pictures of ready-mades, like the toothy grill of a junked pink Ford parked in a bunch of weeds, a bittersweet elegy of bygone America that in his hands stayed blessedly clear of nostalgia.
Other artists came to love Polaroids, of course. Warhol recognized it as the perfect tool to capture the gaudy, passing glamour of the disco 1970s, not to mention the genitals of visitors to the Factory, whom he apparently asked to drop their pants for posterity’s sake. (“It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t,” he reportedly said.) Conceptual artists like Vito Acconci identified with its quotidian efficiency and William Wegman made a nice career photographing Weimaraners he called Man Ray and Fay Ray. David Hockney produced Cubist collages; Chuck Close, portraits. The paradox of such a mass-market machine serving elite purposes proved irresistible to many artists and the Polaroid snapshot became a cliché in high art circles, whose diaristic potential continues to lure chroniclers of fashion like Dash Snow.
Ultimately, though, it’s the populist tradition that lends the demise of Polaroid instant film its poignancy: the power of all those ordinary pictures to salvage forgotten lives — and the finality of the moment after which the mass of billions of snapshots preserving millions of anonymous instants of happiness or private consequence ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion.
In “The Emigrants,” W. G. Sebald’s narrator by chance notices an item in a Lausanne newspaper about the discovery of a dead Alpine climber, a long-forgotten man who happened to have been very dear to someone the narrator once knew and had himself nearly forgotten. The climber’s remains were suddenly released by a glacier in Switzerland, where he had gone missing 72 years earlier.
“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes. “At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”
Or as a yellowing Polaroid snapshot we dumped into a shoebox one day long ago and forget in a corner of the attic; or clipped to the back of the sun visor in the old Buick; or that migrated behind the refrigerator, waiting to be rediscovered.
