Sean O'Hagan 

The Polaroid revival

Sean O'Hagan: Thanks to the Impossible Project, run by three Polaroid enthusiastists, the beauty and banality of film that 'develops in the palm of your hand' is being kept alive
  
  

Patti Smith with Polaroid
Longed-for clunkiness ... Patti Smith with a Polaroid. Photograph: AGF s.r.l/Rex Features Photograph: AGF s.r.l/Rex Features/AGF s.r.l. / Rex Features

The Impossible Project took its name from a quote by Edwin Land, the man credited with the invention of instant photography. "Don't undertake a project", Land once said, "unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible".
Land co-founded the Polaroid Corporation in 1937 and his film became so successful that by the 1960s, it was estimated that about half of all American households owned a Polaroid camera. In 2007, though, when digital technology had made the mobile phone most people's instant camera of choice, the Polaroid Corporation announced that it had stopped manufacturing instant cameras. The following year, it stopped producing instant film. The final batch expired in November of last year and it seemed as if Polaroid film had finally gone the way of the cassette tape and the seven-inch single.
Enter the Impossible Project. Founded by Florian Kaps, an Austrian businessman, and Andre Bosman, the former head engineer of a large Polaroid plant in the Netherlands. When I spoke to Marlene Kelnreiter, the spokeswoman for the Impossible Project on behalf of the Observer in September, she pointed out that annual sales of Polaroid film were around the 10m mark when the company ended production, and that the project would be reinventing instant film for an existing "huge global niche market". It still sounded like a tall order, though.
A couple of weeks ago, a package from the Impossible Project landed on my desk. It contained the first two Impossible instant films: the extravagantly named PX 100 Silver Shade/First Flush and the PX 600 Silver Shade/First Flush. They certainly looked good in their minimal and stylish packaging.

The accompanying press release says: "Impossible's new PX Instant Films are dedicated to all the people who feel a similar passion for the magic of analog Instant Photography as we do. Carefully manufactured to develop slowly in the palm of the hand, PX Silver Shade Films are monochromatic Instant Films that are designed for usage with traditional Polaroid cameras." Initial reactions to the quality of the film that develops slowly in the palm of your hand have been mixed, though, with many bloggers noting that its does not perform well in cold weather and that the end results look, as one user put it, even more "old-timey" than the Polaroid film. Gone are the telltale yellow tones of the old film, replaced by a silvery sepia hue that looks darkly opaque to the point of ghostly.

Given the right kind of marketing – "The film that develops in the palm of your hand!" – the Impossible instant film will probably succeed, but the bigger question underlying all this techo-primitive innovation is, why do so many of us long for the Polaroid in all its clunky, clumsy, grainy old-fashionedness? Is it, as Martin Parr has suggested, just another kind of "processed nostalgia" and, if so, why do we not settle for the online digital trickery of Poladroid.net, where you can turn your digital images into "Polaroid-like pictures", or the iPhone Hipstamatic App – "Digital Photography Never Looked So Analog".
The answer, I suspect, is to do with the kind of demands a Polaroid camera makes on the user, which are manifestly not the same kind of demands a digital camera makes. One is big, hands-on, clunky, somewhat difficult and, even in an expert's hands, can be hit-and-miss. The other is streamlined, compact, easy, and relatively fail-safe in terms of the end results – you shoot and delete until you capture the image you want. One is somehow "authentic", the other is arguably even more so but does not carry the weight of the relatively recent, thus overly fetishised, pop-cultural past. (Apple understand this but overstate it with their too-knowing Hipstamatic pitch: "Mod Out Your Camera at the HipstaMart." Puh-lease!)

Much, too has been made of what Kelnreiter termed "the beautiful and poetic" nature of the Polaroid image that seems suited to capturing the overlooked beauty and poetry of the everyday, even the banal. Great photographers, from Robert Frank to Robert Mapplethorpe, have made Polaroid pictures that have utilised the limits of the form as a discipline in itself. (Frank famously scratched and wrote over the images in an attempt to capture what he felt, rather than what he saw.)

Interestingly, too, Andy Warhol and Andrei Tarkovsky used Polaroids, one to capture celebrity in all its hollow, brash, trashy transience, the other to convey the intimacy and melancholy beauty of things; what you might call the being thereness that the best Polaroid pictures capture. The Polarioid was all things to all photographers.

Then again, even the most basic mobile phone camera can do something similar with the right light and shade. Indeed, Joel Sternfeld's latest book echoes the Polaroid books of old in so far as it comprises his mobile phone shots of the shopping malls and consumers of Dubai. It is called iDubai and announces the coming of the phoneur – the photographer as flaneur, forever walking and shooting and, if he has time, daydreaming.

Meanwhile, Polaroid recently announced its onward march into the digitalised future by hiring the ubiquitous Lady Gaga as a "creative director". She has, in her own words, "been developing prototypes in the vein of fashion/technology/photography innovation, blending the iconic history of Polaroid and instant film with the digital era". What that means is anyone's guess but Gaga also posted a photograph of herself on Twitter holding up a Polaroid business card bearing her new title. Compositionally, it looked like an old-fashioned, swiftly taken Polaroid self-portrait – the card obscured the top half of her face – but it was too sharp, too artfully rough and ready to be the real thing. It made me wonder who the Impossible Project could hire as the face of their new analog instant photograph range? Fleet Foxes? Bonnie Prince Billy? Laura Marling? Or, maybe a still-influential cult figure from the not-too-distant past – Alex Chilton, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake …?

Now see this

Robert Adams describes himself as "a palmist" rather than a prophet. He has been photographing America's disappearing wildernesses for several decades. In his new book, Gone? (Steidl £44) he revisits with his camera the rural walks he took as a boy. The result, as ever, is a series of understated and compelling black and white landscapes where the destructive presence of destructive humans is hinted at rather than spelt out.

 

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