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I’m old enough to remember the excitement of the Polaroid SX-70: it spit out a piece of paper, and you watched a picture develop in front of your eyes. Pure fucking magic, at a couple of bucks a shot.
Polaroid went out of the instant film business a few years ago, after a complete marketing failure. One highlight of their decline was the official response to the OutKast video “Hey Ya!” (Shake it Like a Polaroid): a warning that shaking a Polaroid might distort the image.
After Polaroid failed, a couple of artists bought their plant in Holland and started The Impossible Project, an effort to resurrect that plant and create new instant film. Today, they’re launching their first new product, a line of black-and-white film that fits in old SX-70 and Polaroid 600 cameras. Color’s coming by the end of the year.
Their site is gorgeous, and the whole thing is testament to what a few very determined people can do. I hope they make it.
Pigs & Spiders
Damn you. Now that song’s going to be in my head all day.
Interesting stuff though. I wonder, as we march forward, what other technologies will be resurrected for their unique qualities and nostalgia?
Mary
never mind…misread
jeffreyw
Yup, know just what ya mean, pard.
Xecky Gilchrist
Oh, cool! I have a bunch of flickr pals who are polaroid enthusiasts and they were crushed when the company announced the end of the film. I had heard of the Impossible Project but had lost track – glad to know they’re getting results.
calling all toasters
What is “film”?
twiffer
glad to hear this. frankly, i think my toddler would freaking LOVE a polaroid camera. digital may also be instant, but not in the same way. there is something to be said about having an actual photograph, one that can be held, instantly.
ccham44
Just this weekend I discovered that the Polaroid is not actually dead.
They had one of these babies:
http://www.polaroid.com/products/0/266909
at a friend’s wedding, so people could take pictures at the reception, print them, and stick them on a scrapbook page.
The photos are small, but it worked well enough.
Brachiator
Film? Polaroid, like Eastman Kodak and everybody else, didn’t really see digital coming. There ain’t no marketing success in the world that could have saved them.
Cool site. But aside from antiquarian niches, film is dead.
mistermix
@Brachiator: Kodak still makes film, and they’ll be making it for a long time. Polaroid just couldn’t downsize fast enough. I fault them for that, perhaps unfairly, but if they would have stuck it out they could have had a profitable niche.
Film is like vinyl to the kids nowadays: retro cool. They pay a mint for old, expired Polaroid film.
Violet
My best friend had one and my parents wouldn’t buy me one. OMG! Th3y wEre sew m33n!
I read recently that Polaroid pictures were very trendy. Glad to see this project is going forward.
PeakVT
Maybe they’ll resurect Ektachrome, too. (I had a dream about digital vs. film cameras last night.)
wenchacha
My daughter just got the Fuji Instax camera, and thinks it is fun. She’s a Fine Art Photog major, who happens to love the dark room. Where they do still use that fillum stuff.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Instant-Film-Cameras/ci/14536/N/4294188785
For practical purposes, digital is what people will want to use. For art, I think that film will be here for some time to come. You can Photoshop til the cows come home, but some things are better done with film, and allow something that still resembles a human touch on the final product.
She goes to RIT, which has a very big Photography department. New freshman majors will not spend a first semester in the dark room any longer. Some may never use anything but digital. Still, there are people who will continue on with pinhole cameras, wet-plate processing and other anachronistic techniques. It’s kind of the same idea as hand-thrown pottery vs molds, or handmade, cast jewelry instead of CNC laser cut pieces. There’s a place for both; one is just for much smaller scale production.
dmsilev
@Brachiator:
Eh? Kodak pretty much invented the practical digital camera; the Bayer color filter that makes color photography on a CCD possible was a Kodak invention. If you buy a $30K digital medium-format system, there’s a pretty good chance that it has a Kodak sensor in it.
Sure, the advent of cheap digicams hammered their film business, but they did a much better job of adapting to the digital era than Polaroid.
-dms
JenJen
This is seriously awesome news. I had no idea. I’ve always loved Polaroid cameras, the older the better. Up until a few years ago when the film disappeared, I was still using my el-cheapo One-Step and found it so much more fun and creative in social situations than the more convenient digital.
Yay!!
cleek
the only advantage Polaroid has over a digital camera is the ability to get a hard copy of the image, within seconds of taking it, without having to hook up to a printer. immediacy is all it offers. that, and nostalgia for the over-30 crowd. but it lags even the cheapest of digicams in quality, portability and ease of use. so, as soon as someone finds a way to embed a decent printer (and a spool of photo paper) inside a pocket-sized digital camera, Polaroid will be truly obsolete.
and i’m sure every camera and printer manufacturer is working on this problem.
Jon H
The coolest thing about Polaroid is that you can do transfers.
You load a camera with the old fashioned Polaroid film that you have to peel apart. After you take the picture, you wait a bit, and peel it apart early. Then you smack one of the pieces onto the surface you’re transferring onto, and the emulsion and dyes transfer to it.
It looks really cool.
blogreeder
That sounds great. Although, you should be careful about posting this here because it smacks of Capitalism. Dirty rotten Capitalism. People using capital to buy something. Try the angle that these guys that bought the plant were using stimulus funds instead. (Wait – sorry, it’s in Holland.) And that they will share everything; from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.
Of course, the founder of the project André Bosman was an engineer from Polaroid. It makes more sense now that there was some success. The only thing a bunch of artists could have done was to make the plant a gallery or something.
Sarcastro
Let me know when someone starts remaking PixelVision camcorders.
Stan
@cleek: You mean like this: http://www.polaroid.com/Products/Polaroid+PoGo/Overview/Overview/1804 ?
Brachiator
@mistermix:
Polaroid, in a profitable niche, would still probably ceased to exist as Polaroid Corp. They would have been little more than a shell and a name, no matter how retro cool they might have become. Let them rest in peace.
Ironically, by the way, according to the Wiki, Polaroid missed out on the digital revolution.
And if it hadn’t been for the deliberately retro aspects of the “Hey Ya” video, Polaroid would have faded even more quickly from the public consciousness.
Eh? Kodak pretty much invented the practical digital camera
Not quite.
I grant that they were smarter than Polaroid in seeing the big picture.
RobNYNY1957
Remember Polavision? It was Polaroid’s instant developing movie film, released two years after Betamax, and the same year as VHS. It was rated at ASA 40, which basically meant you could take indoor movies only under lights that would toast bread. I once knew the marketing guru who was in charge of this. His other famous achievements were New Coke and Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. I’m not making that up.
ruemara
@wenchacha:
I will never, ever, ever regret my photo training at NYU. I love digital, but the art is in the film and no one can take that away from us. Scoff if you want, digital peeps, but I’ve never seen a digital that offers exactly the levels of control of a nice field camera, hand processing and hand printing. And can you do polaroid transfers with a digital. No. And p’shop frames with channel ops don’t count. :P