'desidero 44,' by Susan Mikula. (Click to enlarge.)
Susan Mikula uses Polaroid film to document derelict industrial docks and other wrecked Americana, a subject I myself have a fondness for. But she does it in a way that’s entirely her own: using badly outdated Polaroid film found at garage sales and the like, embracing its messed-up color palette and unreliable reagant. That incorporates a stochastic aspect into her process—will this pack of film work? How about this one?—that is, in the digital age, interesting turf to be exploring. She also deliberately shoots out-of-focus, then scans and lightly modifies her Polaroid images to (among other things) get rid of the Mylar gloss of the top sheet. The combination of blur and spoiled film and editing puts her subjects just at the very limits of recognizability. As her gallery’s Website puts it, “Her choice to shoot in Polaroid may have initially been driven by aesthetics, but as the series has unfolded into a cycle of almost 60 finished images that span three years, it has become apparent just how commensurate are her chosen medium and her chosen subject. Mikula has captured a fading aspect of a bygone era with fading film and an obsolete technology.” My kinda photographer. Plus her partner is Rachel Maddow, who gets a lot of airtime in our household.
Great slideshow of her work here. Click through, it’s worth it.
Just noticed a small detail of the interface on WordPress, the blogging platform that underlies Polaroidland. On the comments administration page (where I shovel out the spam and junk mail once a day) each comment has a spot for an avatar, the small photo or icon that appears next to the writer’s name. If you don’t have one, WordPress displays a dummy image when I mouse over that space, and it looks like this:
I swear I’ve seen that white border somewhere before. Can’t quite place it, though. Give me a minute.
Newsflash via Paul: the Instagram camera, with special instant-photo technology built right in, is on its way. Story here.
[Update, 3/15/2013: I thought this was a joke at the time, but it isn’t anymore.]
The Enschedé factory, 1965. (Click to enlarge.)
My depressing visit to Waltham last week resulted in photos of a half-demolished plant that once made Polaroid film. In the latest installment of curios from The Polaroid Newsletter, I’ve got photos of a factory that had a considerably happier turn in the 21st century. It’s the plant in Enschede, the Netherlands, that supplied Europe with film, and whose equipment was saved from scrapping in 2009 by The Impossible Project. In the issue of February 4, 1965, you can see that same factory as it was just coming into being.
Especially cute: The pronunciation guide to the city’s name (very approximate; it doesn’t get the gargled “sch” that only Dutch speakers seem able to produce), and the fact that the accent mark on “Enschedé” was hand-drawn on the mechanicals before printing. You don’t see that much these days—I don’t care how analog-inclined you are.
A few weeks later, SX-70 made the cover of Time magazine.
Forty years ago today, Edwin Land took the stage at Polaroid’s annual meeting to introduce SX-70. He had teased it for years, once briefly revealing an early model (prototype? block of wood?) in his coat pocket, then mentioning it in carefully doled-out bits of information. This week, though, it was time for the whole thing to be shown, and quite a show it was. A Polaroid warehouse in Needham, Massachusetts, was fitted out as a makeshift theater; octagonal stations were built where photos could be shot and displayed. There were a couple of hundred working cameras in the room—and indeed in the world, because production hadn’t ramped up yet.
The shareholders watched photos being taken and saw them develop, but the cameras were hands-off, because Polaroid feared industrial spies, especially from Kodak. Every photo that was shot got a hole punched in its white border, and was then anchored with a stout steel pin to a slotted piece of solid oak lining one of the octagons. One photo got out anyway, as did a bag of the hole-punch chads, which most likely went to Kodak for chemical analysis.
In between demonstrations and lectures, the shareholders got to watch a short film made by Charles and Ray Eames, titled SX-70. It’s just a marvel of understated selling: the power of explanation and demonstration, deployed in the service of a fantastically interesting product. If you haven’t seen it before, you are in for an extremely nice 11 minutes. Enjoy:
Sorry the blog has been quiet for a few days. I was visiting the real Polaroidland.
We’re doing a special slipcased edition of the book, which will include a little extra volume of portraits of Polaroid people. So I was in Cambridge and its environs, snapping SX-70 photos on Impossible Project film. It was fun meeting a lot of the alumni, all of whom have had really interesting professional lives. I’ll post more about it as the edition comes together.
And I made a little visit to the complex in Waltham where most of Polaroid’s film was made. Built over several years, starting in the late fifties, it’s an industrial ruin now. Of the four main buildings, one has been demolished, and the glass-enclosed bridge that joined two of the others is also gone. Here are buildings W2 and W3 (with bridge; it held the cafeteria) in 1960:
The complex on Main Street in Waltham, near Route 128, from Polaroid’s 1960 annual report. W2 is on the left, W3 on the right. (Click all photos to enlarge.)
and here they are is this week. (The images with white borders were made with a Polaroid 180; the others were shot with an iPhone.)
Building W3.
W3, with daffodil.
Building W2, seen from more or less the same angle as in the 1960 photo. At upper right, you can just barely see the palimpsest of the sign reading POLAROID.
In the weeds, shot through the chain-link fence..
Another trace: Late-period Polaroid logo, painted out on the sign at the gate.
And … well, I wasn’t going to admit to this, but what the hell. I jumped the fence and went inside W2, and found something in there that floored me.
As many of you know, Polaroid had a side business in making museum replicas—giant photographic images of artworks, shot on Polaroid film the size of bedsheets, made in a room-size camera. Most were done at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, though a few were also made at the Vatican Museum. Quite a few hung around the Polaroid offices—I saw one when visiting Microcontinuum, a Polaroid spinoff company, last week—and one of them never made it out of the factory before the end. It’s still there, glass broken out, completely trashed by rain and the elements. I would’ve tried to bring it home, but it’s beyond saving. The blistered emulsion falls off the moment you touch it, and the thing is seven feet long–it wouldn’t have even fit in my car. And, because I couldn’t make this up, the scene is of the martyred Christ. (Update, 4/22/12: It is indeed one of the photos taken at the Vatican Museum: The painting is Rafael’s Transfiguration, 1516-1520.)
Wrecked Museum Replica at Waltham, 2012.
I had to cheer myself up after that, and the next morning I walked to Memorial Drive, in Cambridge, which for several blocks has another name.
Stopped by a photo store in the neighborhood shortly thereafter, and when the clerk (an older guy) saw my Polaroid camera, he immediately said, “You’re in the right neighborhood.”
(Update, June 2012: Most of what you see above is gone. Click here for details.)
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.
