An Original Every Time
Polaroid announces the end of the instant film format

WA couple of weeks ago my dad brought me a stack of my old photo albums that he found when he was cleaning his library. Most of the photos were from the 70s and 80s, and most were candid shots of my family, my friends and myself. That would be the skinny former me with lots of hair and no wrinkles. Ah, good times.

I spent a weekend pulling out all of my favorite photos from the albums and scanning them into my computer. As I did so, I noticed that about a dozen of them were Polaroid photos and I remember thinking to myself, “This is the only copy of this photo in existence.”

Photographer Stefanie Schneider specializes in alluring images of America using a large-format Polaroid instant camera.

The Polaroid SX-70 version of its Land Camera, a series named after inventor Edwin Land who developed the first instant film camera 61 years ago.

The cover of Talking Heads’ 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food was made up of 529 close-up Polaroid photos.

That’s because—in case you are unfamiliar with Polaroid cameras—it is a one-shot film format. You take the photo and with a metallic whirring sound, a funky square photo comes shooting out of the camera. Best of all, it develops from a milky gray blur into a photo of people and places right before your eyes. This usually takes about three minutes. Some people swear that it will develop sooner if you wave the photo through the air…but I have yet to see any scientific proof of that notion.

In addition to being a unique slice of life without a negative or digital duplicate, Polaroid photos are cool because of their relative unpredictability. Sometimes the colors come out muted and sometimes they come out spectacularly saturated, with the subtle peach tones of bare skin ripening into bright tangerine and baby blue skies coming out turquoise. If the images created by standard photography are like memories, Polaroid photos are closer to the stuff of dreams.

Last month the Polaroid Corporation (under the control of Petters Group Worldwide) announced that it would cease production of all of its instant film lines, including the popular Type 600 and professional Type 779, by the end of the year. The announcement also stated that Polaroid would shut down three factories in Mexico, Massachusetts and the Netherlands and lay off 450 workers.

The move leaves Fujifilm as the only remaining supplier of instant film in the United States and industry analysts believe that it too will abandon the instant film format.

To fully understand how quickly the demise has come for Polaroid’s instant format cameras, here are a couple of statistics: Eight years ago, sales of instant and digital cameras were nearly identical with 4.2 million instant cameras sold versus 4.5 million digitals. Last year digital cameras outsold instant cameras by a ratio of over 100 to 1, with consumers buying a staggering 28.2 million of the digital kind.

The news of the impending death of instant format film comes as sad news to a number of groups that still use the smelly square photos. A number of medical specialists have relied on the instant photos for decades and certain law enforcement and security agencies prefer them for ID badges because they are difficult to alter or duplicate.

In the world of artistic photography, the instant film format has long been a favorite of certain photographers who like its unique and unpredictable characteristics. It was 30 years ago this summer that artist and musician David Byrne utilized 529 Polaroid close-ups for the artistic mosaic that would become the cover of Talking Heads’ second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. It’s hard to get much cooler than that.

German born artist Stefanie Schneider, who works exclusively with Polaroid Instamatic cameras, said recently, “Polaroid material has the most beautiful quality—the colors on one side but then the magic moment in witnessing the image to appear. Time stands still and the act of watching the image develop can be shared with the people around you. In the fast world of today, it’s nice to slow down for a moment. At the same time Polaroid slows time, it also captures a moment which becomes the past so instantly that the decay of time is even more apparent—it gives the image a certain sentimentality. The Polaroid moment is one-of-a-kind, an original every time.”

While the death of the instant film format is most likely an inevitability in the digital age, it is a sad death nonetheless.