Instant Moment: Portroids

This is just a section of the "K" page. It goes on for way longer than you expect it to.

It wasn’t all that uncommon, back in the heyday of instant photography, for people to shoot Polaroid photos of celebrities or star athletes as a medium for autographs. It’s a cute and nonthreatening idea: You get to chat with the star for a minute while the photo comes out, and you get a nice souvenir of the moment. The white tab at the bottom of the Polaroid picture is just about the right size for a signature, too.

What I didn’t know about till recently, however, was the unnervingly large collection of these photos at Portroids. It’s all the work of one unnamed guy—still at it!—who presumably hangs around stage doors and autograph rope lines, and has been doing so for eight years. He doesn’t seem to catch that many of the hugest celebrities, but he has a few, like Robert Redford, and  once you get down to the fame level of, say, Saturday Night Live cast member, he’s absolutely comprehensive. (In fact, he seems to have a particular taste for smart comedy people, like guys from The Daily Show.) He posts one a day on Twitter, and archives every one on his site.