The Afterlife of Polaroid

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-afterlife-of-polaroid/

All the while, of course, friends were laughing over instant snapshots passed around at parties, and shutterbugs whose tastes would have shocked the drugstore photo-finisher were shooting and sharing explicit pictures in bedrooms. Polaroid systems manufactured ID cards, documented crime scenes, assisted real-estate agents and insurance adjustors, monitored film-set continuity, and expanded the reaches of micrography. How, then, did the business go so wrong?

Polaroid, explains Buse, did not “sleepwalk into the digital era”; it saw what was coming and, “as early as 1980, when the OneStep was the world’s best-selling camera, and Polaroid was reaping the benefits of simplified SX-70 technology, the company applied for patents for an electronic camera.” Yet its perfectionistic research culture slowed production, and while the firm was “accustomed to holding a monopoly over instant photography, protected by a wall of patents, [it] held no such advantage in digital imaging.” When the digital PDC-2000 finally launched in 1996, more than 40 competitors had already entered the market. Worse, Polaroid had doubled down on a “doomed hard-copy wager”: Convinced that users of all stripes would always desire a physical print to hold, the company concentrated on developing scanners and other peripherals to relay the image from virtual to tangible to replicable—precisely the intermediate steps that networked data had rendered obsolete.

Polaroid declared bankruptcy on October 12, 2001. Its name was licensed to other firms, including Fuji, whose Instax camera and film were rebranded as Polaroid 300 for sales in the United States. The Polaroid Collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s, and the corporate archives donated to Harvard Business School. (With devastating precision, Buse observes that the short-term CEO and chairman who presided over this dismantling received “one-off payments of $8.5 million and $12.8 million, respectively,” while “approximately 6,000 retirees who had lost benefits” got checks for $47 each.) Then, in 2008, a Dutch-Austrian enterprise dubbed the Impossible Project bought up as much of the remaining film stock as it could get its hands on, along with the last functioning film-production facility, in the Netherlands. While serving as a distribution hub for refurbished cameras and leftover packs of original film, the start-up began to rebuild Polaroid’s supply chain and reinvent its film under its own name. Proclaiming an intention “to re-design analog photography for a digital generation,” the Impossible Project has taken as its motto Land’s dictum: “Don’t undertake a project unless it’s manifestly important and nearly impossible.” One can now download an app from the Impossible Project’s website and use it to crop and edit a smartphone image, print that image on Impossible instant film, pass it back through the app’s scanner, and retransfer it to a digital device to be shared (again) online.

[alfredo]

1. The impossible camera

https://us.impossible-project.com/?gclid=CO3nm4vY_MwCFcMbgQodoi8Mvw