This Polaroid photo was taken a sixth of a second after a rifle bullet ended John F. Kennedy’s life. Apart from Abraham Zapruder’s movie, it’s the best photographic evidence from the scene in Dealey Plaza.
11/22/63, just after 12:30 p.m. (Click to enlarge.)
On November 22, 1963, Mary Moorman was standing at the edge of the grassy knoll, near the curb, with her friend Jean Hill. They can be seen in the Zapruder film (Jean is in a red coat, which stands out against the green grass). Mary is holding her Polaroid camera, Model 80A. Those cameras used rollfilm, which you couldn’t shoot in series quickly: You had to wait for each print to process before pulling the next tab, and that took ten seconds or so. Moorman thus had one chance to catch the presidential limousine as it passed, and she did not miss her moment.
There’s another copy of this image on Wikipedia, and it looks different. A few minutes spent visiting Kennedy-assassination Websites (and let me tell you, that’s an eye-opening few minutes) tell me that it’s probably from a copy made by a policeman that was eventually copied again, cropped, and sent out via the Associated Press. The original is sharper, though a big fingerprint has degraded the image. The print may have been imperfectly coated when new, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. The people on the scene may have been a little distracted.
Moorman has said that she shot another photo a little earlier, showing the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, and thus the assassin himself (or not, depending on your beliefs). She says she gave it to a law-enforcement officer at the scene, and that it subsequently disappeared.
As of 2020, Moorman still lives in Dallas, and reportedly still has her original print, despite a report (on Wikipedia and elsewhere) that she sold it in 2008 for $175,000.
In the early fifties, Polaroid owners received (or could subscribe to?) a little instructional magazine called Minute Man. (Click any scan to enlarge.)
Vol. 3, No. 6.
Vol. 3, No. 5.
The name reminds me of two things: (a) Polaroid’s New England roots, which occasionally made themselves noticed in things like publicity photos of dockside or snowy scenes, and (b) a blithe disregard, back then, for female buyers. The earliest Polaroid consumers were almost all men, both because of the gadgety quality of the system and because the early cameras were just so damn big and heavy. Marketing to women, and lower price points for female-centric retail settings like supermarkets, came later.
Vol. 3, No. 4.
Only the last of these four consecutive issues—the one with the red cover—has a full date printed on it: November-December 1953. The green one discusses the new Model 110 Pathfinder camera, which first appeared in ’52.
Vol. 3, No. 3.
Inside, it’s mostly basic amateur-photo tips. One issue has a few pages on how to make better photos of your pet. Another tells the story of “Pert and vivacious Dorothy Whittington,” who had just got back from Europe and took some nifty pictures with her new Polaroid camera while she was there.
There’s also an intriguing little box about a joint project between Sylvania and Polaroid in which 1,000 flashbulbs were set off at once to illuminate the entire facade of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for a photo shoot. Thousands of photographers were cued to open their shutters, all the bulbs fired, and at least one of them, a fellow named Roy Carson, had his picture 60 seconds later. It’s kind of a crude (though not uncomplicated) approximation of today’s HDR digital photography. Results below.
Not bad, Roy!
Not exactly an instant-photography story, but of interest anyway: An Amherst College grad student has conducted a brief interterm class teaching students to use a Speed Graphic, shooting old-style 4×5 sheet film. (My wife, Ellen, an Amherst graduate, spotted this in her alumni bulletin.) Photos and post about it here, and video here:
I’m not knocking it, believe me—I’m in favor of anything that coaxes people to set aside the digicam now and then in favor of an analog camera. (As I repeat to anyone who will listen, the only way to keep film in production is to continue buying and shooting it.) But I am a little surprised at the cluelessness of the video, whose narrator sounds incredulous that ANYONE would POSSIBLY want to focus and set aperture and shutter speed MANUALLY in the 21st century. He is not aware, I guess, that serious photographers routinely turn off all the electronics. Setting an f/stop is not exactly re-learning the chemistry of making collodion prints or tintypes, despite what this guy thinks. People, not machines, take good pictures.
The very last batches of Polaroid instant film passed their expiration date in late 2009, and even if you’ve kept some in the fridge, it has begun to go sour. As instant film gets old, it first shifts in color, generally toward a pinkish-yellow, then to brown; then it starts to get erratic, failing to process evenly; then you get big undeveloped patches of negative; then you get nothing.
Those final batches of film, kept cold, are now approaching the end of their reliable life. So Impossible has commissioned five photographers to shoot off nearly the last of their Spectra stock, and the results are on view at the company’s gallery on lower Broadway. Two of the artists are household names (the A-list photographer Mary Ellen Mark and the actor-Yalie-writer-polymath James Franco) but the other three more than hold up their end of the deal.
By Jennifer Juniper Stratford, via The Impossible Project. (Click to enlarge.) I'm pretty sure that's a ’61 Cadillac.
Web page devoted to the show here; if you’re in New York, it’s in Impossible’s gallery and shop at 425 Broadway, near Canal Street, on the fifth floor. I have to say that the show (through no fault of its own) leaves me with mixed feelings, paradoxically because the photographs are so damn charming. As much as I admire Impossible’s product thus far—especially the latest iteration—seeing even aged Polaroid film reminds me how effortless it was to use, and how extraordinary. Shows like this get me fulminating about the greed and shortsightedness that led to the near-death of this remarkable invention. It didn’t have to happen (my book explains exactly how it did), and it shouldn’t have.
Fortunately, they’re great pictures, which goes a long way toward cheering me up afterward.
The actor Adam Goldberg—probably best known for playing a cranky composer in (Untitled), though he’s also in Saving Private Ryan and the memorable The Hebrew Hammer, and directed I Love Your Work—is a serious photographer as well. He photoblogs, too, posting regularly here, and he shoots lots of Polaroid and Impossible film. A lot of the recent postings beautifully document a road trip through the Southwest with his violinist girlfriend, Roxanne Daner, and four Polaroid cameras (as well as a bunch of conventional film gear). Roxanne’s own blog is here, and she’s really good, too. One of Goldberg’s recent photos:
By Adam Goldberg, via his Tumblr page (link appears above).
Even his headshot on IMDB (a) is a photo on peel-apart Polaroid film, probably the Sepia stuff that Impossible has sold, and (b) shows him wielding a Polaroid Big Shot camera. Sheesh–these two are in almost as deep as I am.
Kind of, anyhow. It was just around Christmas 1946, and Edwin Land’s company—coming down from a huge boom in war work, and shrinking from over 1200 employees to about 250—had spent nearly three years secretly working on a new project. Land was essentially betting the farm on this new thing, with confidence but no guarantee that it would take off. The new product, for now code-named SX-70, would be revealed to the world the following February, in New York. But on this December night in Cambridge, Land invited a bunch of employees to a private screening at the University Square Theater (now the multiplex Harvard Square Theater) in Cambridge. And he showed them a couple of minutes of a movie called The Horn Blows at Midnight, starring Jack Benny and Alexis Smith.
Benny plays a horn player turned angel sent down to Earth to sound the final trumpets, finishing off the wobegone planet and its irritating inhabitants. (Given this cheery premise for a comedy, it’s probably no wonder that the movie was a big flop, and that Benny spent the next three decades deploying it as a punch line.)
Here’s the scene Land showed his staff. Watch through about 13:00.
At the University Square, the clip ended, the lights came up, and Land asked his staff:”Did you get it? That’s SX-70!” Some did, some didn’t. Two months later, nearly everyone in America did, courtesy of Life magazine.
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