girl with Siamese cat

girl with Siamese cat

posing for a Polaroid,

enigmatic smile

In 1972 we sold the Nikon totally manual SLR to buy the original Polaroid SX-70, the first instant SLR and the first camera to use the new integral print film. It was an elegant camera, with its body finished in brushed chrome and genuine leather panels, and so slim folded up that it fit in a pocket or purse. A magical camera. Take a photo, out pops an embryonic print and it develops automatically right before your eyes in broad daylight. Everything required for development -- negative, developer, fixer -- was contained in the integral film. No more toiling in our darkroom, no more sending film out to be developed. But if you still want to get your hands, literally, in the development process, you can push the emulsion material around during the several minutes before it sets, creating results like impressionistic paintings.
          When Edwin H. Land, founder of Polaroid, announced his revolutionary instant sepia film to the world, he said, "The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic -- to make available a new medium of expression to numerous individuals who have an artistic interest in the world around them."
          Certainly that was our experience as we experimented with our Polaroid SX-70. Even the unmanipulated photos came out looking like a Rembrandt painting, with lots of chiaroscuro, like this portrait of me with our Siamese cat, Suji. There's only problem with this early film that turns into a print -- over the years the finish begins to crackle. So I've been slowly going through old albums, scanning them into digital files and restoring them in Photoshop.
          Polaroid was also one of the early producers of digital cameras, beginning with the PDC-2000 in 1996, but they weren't able to compete in that market. In October 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy. Bank One bought their assets and formed a new company that continued to produce Polaroid cameras. Sadly for Polaroid lovers, they stopped manufacturing the cameras in 2007 and stopped selling the film in 2009. 
          Fortunately, in 2010 the film became available again through The Impossible Project, a company with a name as magical as its products. A month ago, in January 2012, they announced the launching of The Polaroid Classic range, collectible products from different periods of Polaroid's history, with six to ten products to be released each year. Now we can celebrate the resurrection of an amazing artistic medium.