Turns out my book is competing with an iPad app, and not just in the generic sense—all books do that these days—but specifically for title supremacy. Instant: The Polaroid Maker, an app produced by ThinkTime Creations, is a playful Instagrammish thing, one that adds visual effects: Once you’ve edited and filtered your photo, you press a button and it ejects from a rainbow-striped camera, then slowly appears over time. It looks like fun, and I’ll report back if I have more to say after I try it.
The Kindle edition: Looks a lot like the print edition.
It’s on sale, ahead of schedule. (I wasn’t expecting it till after the print edition was out.) You can order it here. Same contents, same photos; doesn’t smell as nice as a new printed book, but it’ll get to you a lot faster.
Obama and Close review the day’s take.
Once again proving that we here at Polaroidland are your best source of obsolete-photo-technology news, The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins follows our recent post about the presidential photo shoot with a perfectly charming Talk of the Town story (subscription required to read it online). I mean, he’s kind of late to the game and all, but it’s still nice.
Been a busy week, and I am late reporting on Tuesday’s announcement from The Impossible Project: a new product, financed through Kickstarter. It’s part-and-parcel with Impossible’s new camera, which has been in the works for some time, and thus far takes the form of (more or less) the bottom half of an SX-70/600-style camera: the motor, pick, processing rollers, and surrounding structure. Eventually, there’ll be cameras built atop that base. This week’s product announcement was a little simpler: a collapsible mount by which you can fit your iPhone to that base, and thus print your digital photos quickly and simply onto a sheet of analog instant film. It’ll be $299 retail when it arrives.
I have to admit that it’s not for me. I much prefer the other direction: shooting on analog film for its look, and then scanning for digital transmission. But apparently I am in the minority among Impossible’s fans, because the Kickstarter goal was $250,000, and it was met in about a day and a half. Impossible is still raising funds; as I write this, the total is headed toward $340K with 25 days to go. A bunch of people have pledged more than $2,000 apiece. I’m impressed, and also delighted to see all that cash headed toward this little company with big plans.
Post–21 Jump Street, pre–Captain Jack Sparrow. I’d guess mid-1990s (a.k.a. the Winona Years). With Spectra camera and hat from L.A.’s notorious Viper Room. 
A positive notice from the big book-trade journal this week. Or, as it might be phrased on the jacket of some future edition:
Publishers Weekly calls INSTANT: THE STORY OF POLAROID “concise and in-depth … carefully constructed … fascinating.”
BUY THE BOOK
Available in many bookstores, online and off-. Click the photo to order from my local, the Strand Book Store.
BUY THE OTHER BOOK
WATCH THE TRAILER
On Vimeo: click the image to view.
