Instant: The story of Polaroid
When Christopher Bonanos takes his son to the Central Park Zoo, he brings one of his many Polaroid cameras. While most parents are snapping the newest members of a much-photographed generation with their ubiquitous smartphones and digital cameras, this dad gets out the now-obsolete technology that has intrigued him since he was a teenager. And as soon as he starts shooting his three-year-old with the animals and shows him the photograph as it develops before their eyes, other children clamour for their own magic picture.
"There is something unique about it in a social setting," Mr. Bonanos says of the classic instant-photography technology. "You watch the picture come out of the mist and you talk about it. … You are giving a little gift."
Mr. Bonanos, an editor at New York magazine, bought his first Polaroid camera when he was 14. Now, 29 years later, and four years since the company stopped making instant film, he is about to launch Instant: The Story of Polaroid, a book on the history of the camera, a technology that foreshadowed the digital camera and social-media exchanges that would spell its demise.
After all, by 2008, consumers could see their pictures instantly on the tiny screens of their cameras, check whether their lighting was right or their subject was squinting, and try again. And the social element of Polaroids – the notion that any moment in time can become an event to record, a gift to exchange and a memory to relive even before it is over – had been codified and hugely expanded by digital technology and social media.
Coincidentally, that year the Whitney Museum in New York organized an exhibition devoted to the intimate Polaroids of the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. To write an article on that irony, Mr. Bonanos called various artists who had used the cameras – including Chuck Close, who depended on them to prepare his huge, photographically realistic painted portraits – to get their reactions to the end of Polaroid film.
"They were not nostalgic or sad – they were furious," Mr. Bonanos says. "[They said] it was greed and mismanagement. This did not have to go away."
Professional artists not only found Polaroid photographs a useful tool for checking lighting and composition, they loved the medium's soft, yet vivid, palette and were intellectually intrigued by its instantaneous nature and its possibility for replication. Polaroid was too unique to be obsolete.
Their passion inspired Mr. Bonanos, who studied the history of technology at Johns Hopkins University, to dig into the story of relentless Polaroid inventor Edwin Land.
Mr. Land invented Polaroid, a polarizing technology that filters light, in the late 1920s, but initially applied it only to the manufacture of sunglasses, car headlights and window shades. In 1937, his Land-Wheelwright Laboratories was renamed the Polaroid Corporation, first developing 3-D glasses and movies and then, in 1947, instant film that developed within seconds.
Consumers, accustomed to film they had to mail in to Kodak and wait to get back in the mail, were no less instantly converted.
"It was not that different from the 1880s," Mr. Bonanos says. "It took a week to get your pictures. If you shot a family party and it was overexposed, too bad. The party was over. To go from a week to 60 seconds, it was like going from the horse and buggy to a car. It floored people."
Mr. Land is often compared to Apple computer founder Steve Jobs for his ability to stay ahead of competitors by clearing consumer hurdles out of the way.
"It was like the iPod when it first arrived, or the bicycle in the 19th century," Mr. Bonanos says. "You never realized what you had put up with until it arrived."
He also compares Polaroid and instant photography in those years to Google and search engines a decade ago: Both were companies that had so fully sewn up a technology no competitor could catch up.
Polaroid went colour in 1963, and in 1972 it introduced the SX-70, the camera that superseded the old peel-back Polaroids with a picture that developed as you watched. It was the iconic technology that came to define the Polaroid experience for many.
But the company stumbled in the 1970s when it finally introduced Mr. Land's next big obsession: instant movie making. The launch had been much delayed and by this time Betamax, the early version of the video cassette, was available. Its tapes lasted an hour, compared withPolaroid's three minutes.
Meanwhile, the company became embroiled in a huge patent lawsuit against Kodak's instant camera. Mr. Land retired in 1980, leaving fans to debate what went wrong.
"They needed the next big idea and by that time [Mr.] Land was gone," Mr. Bonanos says.
Thirty years later, after a bankruptcy and a corporate buyout of a brand that is now going digital, it is a small group of diehards who may be Mr. Land's true successors. The Impossible Project, a small company that bought up the last remaining Polaroid factory just before it was demolished, is working to recreate from scratch the complicated chemical recipe for integral film – that is, the film that develops while you watch.
It's an enthusiasts' niche, but not a tiny one: The company says it expects to sell a million packs of film this year. "It's cool – it's a hipster thing," Mr. Bonanos says. The camera that everybody's dad had has become geek chic: Posting digital photos to Facebook while the party is still rocking may be childishly easy, but there is nothing that quite replaces handing someone a physical object.
So, Mr. Bonanos can still find film for the five or six working Polaroid cameras he uses, either from the Impossible Project or from Fuji, which still makes the peel-back style film for older Polaroid cameras. He actually owns several dozen more (he is not sure quite how many) because people who discover his interest are always digging them out and offering them up – as if to repay the little gift of the softly coloured square with white borders, which magically showed them their own image, captured but moments before.