Requiem for a Polaroid

Polaroid cameras put pizzazz and spontaneity into any party and make camera geeks out of all of us. In able hands they can produce serious (and seriously beautiful) art. What’s not to like about the Polaroid?

Profit.

So says the Polaroid Corporation as it tolls the death knell of a camera that changed photography and, its corollary, how we see the world. Apparently, the ‘instant film camera’ just isn’t instant enough for the growing numbers of digital users who, in a supposed age of impatience and vaporous attention spans, want to see the world without delay. Of course, those lovely little squares of transparent nitrocellulose polymer film embedded with microscopic crystals of iodoquinine sulphate can seem a little primitive, maybe even wasteful and costly. Whatever its deficiencies, the amazing legacy of the Polaroid camera just wasn’t sufficient justification for its continued production.

Polaroid instant film cameras, the last of their line, are being discontinued in 2008. The other side of disruptive technology is the inevitable fading away, like photographs left in sunlight, of the older gadgets that once brought us joy. They become objects of nostalgia, curiosities whose ever-growing shadow is obscurity and oblivion. It is a somehow sad ending to an iconic camera whose origins reach back beyond World War II to Edwin Herbert Land (1901-91), the American scientist famously obsessed with, and responsible for, the success of Polaroid...


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