Instant obsolesence
28/04/08 19:30 Filed in: Photography
Polaroid's J66 Instant Camera
That Edwin Land was brilliant is beyond question. His two contributions to modern technology, the concept of polarizing light passing through a lens so that reflections were eliminated and the idea of a camera that processed its own images was so far out of the field of normal thinking that it would be decades before they settled into casual use.
Sunglasses that aren’t polarised are now commonly thought to be useless tinted glass and the idea of a camera that develops its own images, well that changed fundamentally between the time that Land through up his light sensitive paper and caustic processing gels.
I don’t often talk about my first experience with a camera because it was so clandestine. My father left boxes of his belongings behind when he separated from my mother, and they were supposed to be stored out of bounds at our home on Mucurapo Road.
This didn’t stop me from exploring during the July-August vacations, and I found what I remember as a Polaroid J66 model instant camera. The manual was written for a savvy adult, but there were a few packs of black and white Polaroid in the case, so I set about making a happy mess of both camera and packs. I may have shot one or two blurry, developed images during that first, furtive exploration of photography, but what I remember most clearly was how pungent and searing the chemicals in those early packs were.
Much later on, when I entered the field of professional photography for the first time, I shot with a Mamiya medium format camera which had a Polaroid back that was invaluable for proofing complicated lighting setups.
Digital photography essentially ended the allure of 60 second development with split-second gratification on an LCD. Land’s idea was sound, as the overwhelming acceptance of modern digital photography attests, but the execution went swiftly from ahead of its time to hopelessly behind the times.
It wasn’t the first time that Polaroid’s chemical technology was superseded by electronics. An early movie format, Polavision, which made use of a version of the sandwiched processing of Polaroid instant packs was killed almost as soon as it was introduced by VHS recorders and cameras.
In February, the Polaroid Corporation, a shell of the company in its heyday, announced that it would stop manufacturing the packs of film and chemicals used by the cameras, shutting down its factories and laying off the workers. Fujifilm continues to manufacture a small subset of the Polaroid range.
Or is it? A number of specialist applications kept Polaroid cameras in the game, including quick forensic snapshots, machine specific applications in dentistry and dermatology and travel photographers who used the cameras to give their subjects an immediate keepsake.
The SX-70, possibly the most famous of the cameras that the company produced, created a particularly interesting image, one that could be pushed around with a firm stylus to create painterly, one of a kind images.
You can see some of this work done by my friends Sonya and Fernando here. They even did one of me working on an early hand coded version of my website when we were supposed to be relaxing down the islands.
SX-70 users are among the many petitioners hoping to convince a better off photography company to acquire the manufacturing assets and licencing rights that Polaroid is about to shutter.
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