The first Polaroid instant camera saw success nearly as instant as its film, selling out of its initial models less than 24 hours after the Polaroid Land Model 95 was born. But, in the ensuing 75 years after that first instant camera sold out, the company would rise to a household name as synonymous with instant photography as Kleenex is to tissue, crash into bankruptcy fueled by a Ponzi scandal, suffer through an era of gimmicky licensing deals until finally find footing keeping instant film alive for artists and retro fans.
Yet, despite a sordid past, the photographers using Polaroid today — and even those who no longer use Polaroid — have little negative to say about the modern Polaroid. Rather, the photographers using both expired and modern Polaroid film today love the instant film for a reason that echoes the company’s roller-coaster past: chaos and imperfection. In a series of interviews with several current and former Polaroid photographers, the overwhelming response wasn’t a love for the retro vibes but an embrace of the imperfect, unexpected results that slowly appear on ejected instant film.
“I have always loved Polaroid, and instant film in general because you can invite chaos into the mix,” said James Wigger, a Polaroid and wet plate photographer who uses classic mediums to explore the human condition. “I rarely if ever shoot an image without bending, cutting, spraying, or manipulating the image as it is developing. It’s not a digital filter.” For James, this is real analog. And when he nails the image, he believes it’s something very special.
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Polaroid’s Instant Success Gave Way to A Sordid History
Polaroid’s first camera succeeded almost as fast as the instant film developed—the Polaroid Land Camera sold out of its initial 57-camera production run within minutes. Rather than sending film in for development, the first instant camera used rollers to crush the layer of chemicals that would develop the negative onto the positive receiving sheet. Once the film developed, the positive had to be peeled off from the negative. Edwin Land’s idea for self-developing film propelled the company to become an iconic name and instantly recognizable brand, eventually developing a self-contained instant film that no longer even required peeling the two layers apart. With Land at the lead, the company thrived, becoming one of the era’s most popular cameras.
This success continued on for years and gave birth to cameras like the Polaroid Land 180 and so much more.
However, the company’s transition as photography pivoted to digital was rife with obstacles and fraudulent leadership. When Polaroid declared bankruptcy in 2001, digital technology was largely blamed for the company’s struggle. But that was just the beginning. In 2005, after yet another bankruptcy, Polaroid sold to Petters Group Worldwide. Polaroid filed for bankruptcy yet again in 2008, as owner Tom Petters was investigated for a 3.7 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Petters was later sentenced to 50 years in prison in 2010.
As Polaroid struggled to find its identity in the digital age, the iconic name and rainbow colors became its most valuable asset via licensing deals. They even demanded that Fujifilm pay for the rights to make and sell Instant Film. While Polaroid had stopped making cameras by 2007, the company loaned out the name and logo to other companies for products like the Polaroid Snap Zink camera, which was actually produced by a company called C&A Marketing. Before long, the Polaroid name was stamped on anything from literal lightsabers to TVs and smartphones.
The Impossible Project’s Determination to Salvage a Legacy
Amid bankruptcy claims and the investigation into Petters, Polaroid announced the discontinuation of instant film in 2008. The company had ceased production of negatives years earlier in 2004, anticipating it had enough remaining to continue creating the film for another decade. But, like the original camera that was expected to last until the next production run but sold out in minutes, those negatives were nearly depleted by mid-2008.
Polaroid’s leadership at the time repeatedly denied the efforts of Florian Kaps, a film enthusiast and owner of a Polaroid fan community and online retailer, to save the film. But, just days before the film’s manufacturing machines were to be torn down, Kaps met with the plant manager, André Bosman, and the two devised a scheme to save the equipment. In a plan dramatic enough to inspire a movie, the group managed to save the manufacturing equipment. It formed the company The Impossible Project, a film start-up that initially subsisted entirely separate from the Polaroid corporation.
While the Impossible Project managed to save the manufacturing equipment, the original formulas were gone, and the supply chain had broken over materials no longer in production. While instant film experienced a rebirth with Impossible, reinventing the film from scratch meant early film was plagued by issues from inconsistencies to longer developing times. But, propelled by artists and a trend for vintage, the company managed to not only save the film but eventually purchased Polaroid itself, becoming the company that it had once set out to save.
A Love for Imperfection
While Polaroid’s past is a myriad of imperfections, it’s precisely the flawed fallibility of the instant film that brings photographers to the medium today. Fine art photographer Kristen Thys van den Audenaerde discovered Polaroid on accident after reading about The Impossible Project in 2016 and was hooked after the first blurry picture spit out.
“When I was shooting digital,” she said, “there were two things that frustrated me: my own drive for perfect images, resulting in images that had been over-retouched. And a sense that everyone was doing the same and creating the same perfect photos; I never saw images anymore that gave me a wow feeling as I always realized that was not how the image came out of the camera. She continued to wax poetically about the brand.
“From my first shots on Polaroid, I had such a sense that this was the way photography was supposed to be. It felt like I was able to capture things the way they had to be captured. The urge to retouch or alter things disappeared completely, and I learned to embrace and love imperfections.”
While digital cameras are often judged on factors like how close the colors are to reality, Polaroid photographers tend to love the unpredictability of the medium. Photographer Lorenzo Papadia uses Polaroid film because the result is different from reality. The French photographer also finds the eight-shot limit inspiring. “Using Polaroids is very important for my style, because it is a type of support that allows the observer to dream about what he sees, the final result being very different from reality,” he said. “The approach with respect to the digital medium is completely different: having 8 poses creates a limit, having only one lens creates a limit, knowing you can do everything to avoid making a mistake in framing helps the photographer and in seeking the synthesis of things. Then the final result is magical, completely different from digital, always the same.”
While some find the limitations freeing, others find the cost of each shot prevents them from getting their best work. Zeno Spyropoulos is a former Polaroid photographer, but no longer uses the instant film due to the limited availability and cost. “I love Polaroids for its intimacy of the snapshot, but if you take in the price of shooting more Polas these days, you take away the best photos, which are the ones when you are not limited to taking that one good photo,” he said.
“All in all, digital is fine–I don’t throw stones at whatever it is that someone likes to use to make art–but for me it is kind of boring,” Wigger, who uses vintage Polaroid SX-70s as his instant cameras of choice, said. “Great for certain things, but I prefer things that aren’t perfect and have a bit of chaos inherent in the process, hence wet plate and instant films are my mediums of choice.”
The one sore spot among Polaroid Photographers? Discontinued film types
Among the photographers who shared their thoughts with The Phoblographer on today’s Polaroid, none harbored feelings of duplicity towards the longstanding brand. But, many instant artists held the same theme of longing for Polaroid’s discontinued film types. Among the most longed-for is Spectra, Polaroid’s wide-format film. The film was discontinued in 2019 not because of supply chain issues but because the vintage cameras kept jamming and breaking with the modern film, an issue that Polaroid said couldn’t be fixed with film.
Some photographers are also nostalgic for Polaroid’s pull-apart film. The first type of film that Polaroid developed required peeling the positive away from the negative — and Fujifilm later made their own variation. “As much as I love the new Polaroid film, my favorite instant film of all time was the venerable Fuji FP-100C45 peel-apart,” Wigger said. “It had a negative that you could claim out of the goop side – which most everyone threw away–that gave me just what I didn’t know I was looking for: a grainy and kind of messed up image. There have been so many great instant films that have bitten the dust which is what finally pushed me into using the wet plate process – it can’t be discontinued.”
How Modern Polaroid Compares to the Film of The Past
Seventy-five years after the first instant film camera, the film, while still nostalgic, has changed drastically. When the Impossible Project acquired Polaroid’s factory, the recipe and supply chain had already been lost and needed to be built up from scratch. Early Impossible Project film was drastically different than the instant film of just a few years prior.
Gary Ho, the founder of the vintage camera refurbishing company Mint, has been working with Polaroid’s film since 2009. Ho says that the quality of the instant film is typically assessed on five factors, at least from a chemistry perspective: development time, resistance to sunlight during development, consistency, color, and resistance to fading. Since the Impossible Project era, Ho says that today’s instant film has a shorter 5-minute processing time compared to 20 minutes, while the instant prints are now more consistent with richer colors and less fading.
Ho says that some of the changes to today’s Polaroid film can also be attributed to the narrower market of artists and enthusiasts that use the film today compared to the widespread use when Polaroid was at its peak. “Ultimately, the assessment of Polaroid instant film’s quality is subjective and varies based on individual preferences and requirements,” Ho says. “It is important to recognize that today’s film has evolved to meet the demands of a changing market, and despite any inconsistencies, it remains a viable and valuable medium for those who appreciate its distinct characteristics and vintage charm.”
While many photographers appreciate the dramatic improvements to today’s Polaroid film compared with the first batches in the Impossible era, the improved consistency has lessened the possibility of random artistic surprise. “The new SX-70 film is pretty consistent now, which is both good and bad,” Wigger said. “Good because I can count on the film to behave properly (more or less), and bad because it is actually consistent now,” he laughed.
“There has been a lot of discussion between Polaroid shooters about the choices that were made by the company,” Thys van den Audenaerde said. “Whilst I haven’t always agreed with them, I accept that they are no longer a simple start-up and as a larger corporation, they have to make unpopular choices based on generating growth…For me personally, it feels wrong to criticize the company that has given me my passion and that has done the near impossible to keep instant film going.”