Looks like nothing special: a small octavo volume containing annual reports of the Chemical Society, based in London. Any big university library is likely to have it, probably in deep storage.
And then you open it, and it turns out to be special after all:
Yes. This copy belonged to Edwin Land, and presumably crossed his desk in early 1946, precisely as Polaroid’s instant-photography project was secretly steaming along, looking to make a dent in the world. Owing to the unbelievable reach and searchability inherent to online secondhand-book shopping, it made its way into my hands this week.
In 1969, when Edwin Land’s team first produced a photo that could develop out in daylight, he presented his team with a celebratory cake reading “From darkness there shall come light.” The epigraph sounded Biblical, or maybe Shakespearean, but Land (who, let’s face it, thought a lot of himself) had just made it up. The key component was a set of chemicals that functioned as an “opacifier”—something that blocked all light for the minute or so of development, then vanished. It was a technological tour de force, managed principally by a couple of chemists named Stanley Bloom and Sheldon Buckler.
Forty years later, it has been very difficult for the team at The Impossible Project to make similar progress, as it attempts to reproduce the results without access to the old ingredients, many of which are simply no longer made. Land had a team of 50 scientists dedicated solely to the opacifier for a couple of years, with a total research budget in the hundreds of millions; the entire Impossible company numbers 32, with a tiny fraction of the capital to invest. As a result, Impossible can’t work out all the bugs before selling its product; it has to sell the beta tests, and so far, they have been promising but also frustrating. Impossible’s opacifier thus far has been nearly but not entirely light-tight, meaning that photos have to be shielded as the camera ejects them, using a piece of cardboard or a cardboard box or a black plastic tongue that Impossible sells. It’s manageable indoors, but infuriating outside, where the light is brighter and the slightest breeze messes up the process. I have spoiled a lot of photos that got accidentally flashed one way or another. At $3 apiece, that has put a lot of customers off a second order.
This past week, a newsletter blast from Impossible revealed that the problem has, practically speaking, been conquered. A vastly improved opacifier is in the works, and packages of test film have been made available to a select group of Impossible’s designated Pioneer customers. And here are some of the first results: photos shot and developed without a shield.
There are more here, in the Flickr group devoted to these films. Impossible notes that the colors haven’t been optimized in this test batch of this film, and that they’ll be better in the production run. If you ask me, it’s the first product they’ve produced that is a genuine replacement for Polaroid film, and I suspect I am going to be shooting a lot of it. Reportedly, a full re-introduction will happen this September. There are still issues for Impossible to work out—like the divot at the top center of many photos that’s caused by inadequate reagant spread—but this has been by far the biggest flaw in the current film, and I am delighted that this little band of crazed enthusiasts has been able to power through it. Props to Martin Steinmeijer, Impossible’s chief chemist, who’s done all those old Polaroid scientists proud. I’ll post my own photo tests as soon as I can get my hands on a pack of this film.
(By the way, sources differ on the exact wording of the cake. I went with the version used by Land’s biographer.)
Undated film clip, late sixties. (Our site’s first GIF!)
Was in Chelsea Market last weekend (for you off-islanders, it’s a big food hall on the West Side of Manhattan, with great vendors of fish, baked goods, produce, ice cream, and the like, as well as some other shops) and stopped by a sale of small designers’ clothes and jewelry. One of them, a T-shirt company called Urban Cricket, caught my eye, for the usual reason (pictured).
Note that the drawing puts the camera, a Model 430, inside the white frame of a Polaroid photo. (You’ll see in a moment why I bring this up. I know, the film formats don’t match, but really, who cares.)
I had my everyday pack-film camera—a Model 180, which looks a lot like the one on the shirt—on my shoulder, so I photographed the vendor and gave her the photo. And a few days later, I ran across this Instagram photo, also appearing on the company’s Facebook page:
…which, if you parse it out, is a digital photo, filtered by an app that makes pictures look like old Polaroids, of a Polaroid photo of a silkscreened drawing of a Polaroid camera that appears in a Polaroid border. [That thunk you just heard was my head against the desk.]
The shirt’s $32. I bought one.
I always figured this whole crazy interest in Polaroid photography stems from playing around my dad’s camera and my grandmother’s, and later my own. Turns out I may have discovered the (extremely unlikely) root of it all.
In the fall of 1976, ABC aired a sitcom called Holmes & Yoyo. It was a type of series that no longer really exists: the funny detective show, in the vein of Barney Miller, if perhaps not as good. It was a buddy setup; Holmes was a plainclothes cop, and Yoyo (played by the excellent John Schuck) was a human-seeming robot whose electromechanical foibles provided much of the show’s humor. You pulled on his tie, for instance, to open his front panel and access his controls.
As a 7-year-old, I dug this show so much that I named my two goldfish Holmes and Yoyo. It lasted thirteen weeks, and I remember a little of it—not much, to be honest. But only today did I discover one detail, after my pal Josh revealed that he also remembered this series and we dialed up the opening credits on YouTube. And I think you can guess what I found. Watch here:
Today we inaugurate a new feature in Polaroidland: Every Wednesday, we’ll show a different star in a Polaroid moment. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones this month, we’ll start out with Mr. Mick Jagger. (Photo, from September 1968, by Baron Wolman. Buy a print here.)
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.
