POLAROID ERA FADES TO BLACK

I found this online and thought it was worth sharing. I've read a lot of articles about the demise of Polaroid, but I think this writer, Steven Winn, nails it quite eloquently.

- Lydia

The Culture: Polaroid era fades to black
Steven Winn
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
If my Uncle Maurice were alive today, he'd have a BlackBerry, a TiVo-equipped flat-screen TV and some smart new digital camera, which he'd use to fill all his relatives' e-mail boxes with shots of horse shows and family reunions. Maurice, who died in the pre-digital 1980s, was a gadget head. So of course, some 50 years ago, he was the first one in our clan to own a Polaroid instant camera.

It seemed miraculous at the time - the clack and whirr and startling disgorgement of a glossy brown square on which an image gradually and magically appeared, the smelly gunk he smeared on to preserve it, his delighted grin as he aimed and shot us in front of our Christmas tree again. Even now, in an age when digital photographs spring from wallet-sized cameras and tiny cell phones to flow around the globe in a perpetual cyber river, that immediate, palpable enshrinement of an ordinary moment still seems amazing. There was some prescient, alchemical wizardry that even the most brightly glowing and fine-grained pixels on Flickr and other photo-sharing Web sites don't possess.

Now, with the recent announcement that Polaroid will stop making instant film next year, the miracle is coming to an official end. Something else is slipping away from us in our frictionless virtual world.

The news has been getting a fair amount of attention in the media. "Almost instant these days is just not fast enough," said Charles Gibson in a recent "ABC World News" report, comparing the speed of digital photography to Polaroid's fast but, in fact, less-than-instantaneous technology. As recently as 2000, according to ABC, digital and instant-film cameras were neck-and-neck in sales. In 2007, 28.2 million digital cameras were sold, compared to 240,000 instant-film cameras.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney spun out a cloud of Polaroid nostalgia - the droll ads with James Garner and Mariette Hartley, the Swinger jingle ("Hey! Meet the Swinger, the Polaroid Swinger"), Madonna photographing herself in "Desperately Seeking Susan." Polaroid cameras were the Apple Macs of their day, wrote Feeney, "feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering."

But it's not only the Boomer generation (and up) that's mourning the demise of Polaroid. Michael Blanchard, a Massachusetts photographer who's in his 20s, has an affectionate video tribute to the employees at the soon-to-be-closed Polaroid plant in Waltham, Mass., on YouTube (links.sfgate.com/ZCYJ) . "I think everyone should go out and purchase some Polaroid film to play around with," notes Blanchard. "It's not going to be around forever!"

Sean Tubridy, a 34-year-old Minneapolis graphic artist, is co-founder of savepolaroid.com, a site that's as much about lamenting a cultural loss as it is about trying to reverse a company's inevitable business decision. Tubridy started using Polaroid film himself about eight years ago.

"I really like the tangible aspect of it," he said by phone the other day. "I work with computers all day - in my graphic design business and for music and video and e-mail. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to get away from that and treat photography as a physical art form." For Tubridy, Polaroid film produces "texture and colors that are very real. They're not as perfect as digital, but they're not as cold and sterile, either."

The Save Polaroid site includes testimonials by artists who cherish instant film not only for its distinctive technical properties but for its intrinsic power. Polaroid film "captures a moment which becomes the past so instantly," says German-born artist Stefanie Schneider, "that the decay of time is even more apparent - it gives the image a certain sentimentality or melancholy." A "Polaroid moment is one of a kind," she adds, "an original every time."

Walker Evans, best known for his classic portraits of Depression-era miners and sharecroppers, is one of many well-known photographers who used Polaroid instant film to free himself up and break new ground. Walker, who died in 1975, used a Polaroid SX-70 camera in what critic Jane Tormey calls "a peculiarly impulsive and uncontrolled way" to shoot friends and students late in his life.

Ansel Adams took Polaroids of himself in a mirror. Lucas Samaras made a series of surrealistic Polaroid self-portraits that were part hallucinatory "photo-transformations" and part modern medieval miniatures. Elsa Dorfman's portraits take Polaroid possibilities in the other direction, by using instant film in a super-size format. Mike Brodie, a.k.a. The Polaroid Kid, made his reputation by riding the rails and back roads of America and capturing the provisional, improvised life he found there with the apt medium of instant film.

But time and the technological improvements march on relentlessly. Today, even the Polaroid Kid has switched to a Nikon F3. "It's been a long time since Polaroid was truly integral to the work of any serious artist I know," said San Francisco fine art photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel. In Fraenkel's view, the demise of instant film only serves to backlight the broader and deeper change in photography, from film of any kind to digital. "That's the most dramatic psychic shift," he said, "from a photograph being something that exists on paper, as it had been from the start of the medium, to something that exists only on a screen or in one's mind."

Now that photographs have become both instantly accessible and slightly ethereal - a complete weather system of virtual vapors - it takes an effort to imagine how remarkable Polaroids seemed at their time. By sweeping away the whole laborious process of extracting film from a camera, schlepping it to the drugstore and waiting for prints to return from some unseen processing plant, instant film turned daily life into something full of shiny new reflective surfaces. Its invention and affordable application invited us to look at and contemplate ourselves in something close to real time.

Polaroid cameras created the first widely available visual feedback loops. They made anyone an instant mythmaker and author of his own life. In doing so they anticipated everything from home video and the explosion of memoirs and journal-keeping to blogs and YouTube.

Saving Polaroid is a quixotic campaign with exactly no chance of actual success. But before instant film passes into its sealed time capsule for good, this retro-techno moment may have something else to say about the way we live with images now. As Tubridy points out, there's still no easy way to quickly turn a digital image into something physical. "In some ways that old technology is still more convenient than digital. You can have a picture in your hand right away."

There's one hard-to-resist presumption about technology, the hypnotizing, gravitational pull toward the belief that it improves the way we do things and interact with the material world. Maybe, now and then, it's worth wondering if that's necessarily so.

Musing on where the flowing stream of technology might take us in the future, Fraenkel offered this speculation: "Perhaps someday photographs won't even exist on screens anymore, but only in our minds." It sounded like he was only half kidding.

ow did it work?

Invented by Edwin Land in 1947, instant film compressed the recording and developing of a photographic image into a single self-contained product. Instant film works as conventional film does, by registering a brief burst of light on a chemically treated surface. Land's innovation was the creation of a sandwich of chemicals that both receives and develops the image.

Between the multiple color-sensitive layers of ordinary film, Land added dye-coupler and developing layers. A timing layer and acid layer complete what writer Tom Harris calls "a chemical chain reaction waiting to be set in motion." The trigger is a reagent, which is applied at one edge of each film segment. As the exposed film is ejected from the camera, rollers distribute the reagent across the surface. That's why the film doesn't start developing until it's out of the camera.

At the end of the sequence of reactions that follow, the reagent causes the film's protective opacifiers to vanish. The film is actually already developed before the finished picture appears before the viewer's eyes. It's the stripping away of the opacifiers that makes the image seem to materialize from the haze.

More than a billion rolls of Polaroid instant film have been sold over the years. The last one will be sold next year.

Source: Howstuffworks.com

E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.

I think this video from You Tube is an appropriate complement to Winn's article - A photo story (Polaroid: An Icon Of A Company) by photographer Michael Blanchard documenting the closure of the Polaroid World Headquarters in Waltham, Mass.