www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28kimmelman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: December 27, 2008 The next few months will end an era that began six decades ago with a contraption called the Model 95 camera. That accordion-style machine delivered instant photography at a price tag equivalent to some $850 today. The SX-70, which spit out color prints, arrived in 1972. American life during the late 20th century had found its Boswell.
More Photos > The demise of Polaroid's instant film cameras has been coming for years. The decision this year by the company that Edwin Land founded to stop manufacturing the film has left devotees who grew up with Polaroid's palm-size white-bordered prints bereft.
Digital cameras that print instant pictures have materialized to fill the void, providing a practical substitute. But as in most affairs of the heart, logic is beside the point. Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroid's leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots. A friend the other day also complained about how Polaroids often came out yellow and, when left on the rainy porch or stuck onto the refrigerator door along with the shopping lists and report cards, ended up faded and curled. One is reminded of the pragmatists' disdain for long-playing records when compact disks arrived. Then DJ's and audiophiles revived LPs, in part precisely for the virtues of its inconvenience. That is to say, LPs, like Polaroids, entailed certain obligating rituals.
His assistant, Robert Craft, would cue the records up, then, when one side was finished, rise from his seat, carefully flip the vinyl disk over, place the needle at the beginning, and rejoin the composer, a simple act of devotion required by the limits of LP technology, endlessly repeated until it became a routine binding Stravinsky and Craft like father and son. I can still picture my own father with his Polaroid camera. "Cheese," he would actually say, and the machine would whir before expelling a print with the negative still attached, requiring the shutterbug to wait a prescribed time before peeling it off. My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon's delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal -- well, who knew what. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one's eyes, right before one's eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film. Digital technology now excuses our mistakes all too easily -- the blurry shot of Aunt Ruth fumbling with a 3-wood at the driving range; or the one of Cousin Jeff on graduation day where a flying Frisbee blocked the view of his face; or of Seth in his plaid jacket heading to his first social, the image blanched by the headlight of Burt's car coming up the driveway; or the pictures of you beside the Christmas tree where your hair is a mess. Digital cameras let us do away with whatever we decide is not quite right, and so delete the mishaps that not too often but once in a blue moon creep onto film and that we appreciate only later as accidental masterpieces. In fact, the new technology may be not more convenient but less than Polaroid instant film cameras were, considering the printers and wires and other electronic gadgets now required, but at this one thing, the act of destruction, a source of unthinking popularity in our era of forgetfulness and extreme makeovers, digital performs all too well. Polaroids, reflecting our imperfectability, reminded us by contrast of our humanity. Glossy talismans in unreal colors, as ephemeral as breath on glass, they wreaked all the more havoc with our emotions for being so unassuming and commonplace.
Walker Evans spent his last years snapping some 2,500 Polaroids. During the early 1970s, to help introduce its product, Polaroid doled out SX-70s with unlimited film to a few prominent photographers, Evans among them. He was having trouble wielding bigger cameras by then, and, clunky though it could be, the SX-70 gave him a fresh lease on life. Its point-and-shoot technology nicely dovetailed with his lean, laconic, democratic scrutiny of the world, stripping photographs down to their bare-bone essentials. It was a prosaic machine for an art about prosaic things in which, as in the camera itself, Evans found a kind of grave eloquence. A contrarian, he also embraced its off-key colors and the fact that many other photographers didn't take the everyman device seriously (not yet anyway). Along with some fish-eyed close-ups of pretty young women he was trying to impress, Evans composed abstract vignettes and snapped street signs that let him fool around with words and puns as he had done decades earlier and generally better. But he also shot great pictures of ready-mades, like the toothy grill of a junked pink Ford parked in a bunch of weeds, a bittersweet elegy of bygone America that in his hands stayed blessedly clear of nostalgia. Warhol recognized it as the perfect tool to capture the gaudy, passing glamour of the disco 1970s, not to mention the genitals of visitors to the Factory, whom he apparently asked to drop their pants for posterity's sake.
The paradox of such a mass-market machine serving elite purposes proved irresistible to many artists and the Polaroid snapshot became a clich in high art circles, whose diaristic potential continues to lure chroniclers of fashion like Dash Snow. Ultimately, though, it's the populist tradition that lends the demise of Polaroid instant film its poignancy: the power of all those ordinary pictures to salvage forgotten lives -- and the finality of the moment after which the mass of billions of snapshots preserving millions of anonymous instants of happiness or private consequence ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion. In "The Emigrants," W G Sebald's narrator by chance notices an item in a Lausanne newspaper about the discovery of a dead Alpine climber, a long-forgotten man who happened to have been very dear to someone the narrator once knew and had himself nearly forgotten. The climber's remains were suddenly released by a glacier in Switzerland, where he had gone missing 72 years earlier. "And so they are ever returning to us, the dead," Sebald writes. "At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots." Or as a yellowing Polaroid snapshot we dumped into a shoebox one day long ago and forget in a corner of the attic; or clipped to the back of the sun visor in the old Buick; or that migrated behind the refrigerator, waiting to be rediscovered.
|
http://csua.com/feed/