Chuck Close at work in the 20x24 studio. That's Gus Van Sant in front of the lens.
If you (like many Polaroid enthusiasts) know all about the magnificence that is the 20×24 camera, pardon this introduction to familiar territory. This will be the first of, I’m sure, many posts about it.
But if you don’t, prepare to be astonished. In 1976, Polaroid marked the introduction of its large-format (8-by-10-inch) peel-apart Polaroid film by going even bigger. To demonstrate the possibilities of the product, Edwin Land ordered the construction of a Polaroid camera that could shoot even bigger frames. The prints were to be 24 inches tall and 20 inches across, matching the size of those from a specialized copy camera already in use at Polaroid, and the whole thing was fabricated in the Polaroid shops over the course of about three days.
Bill Clinton, shot by Chuck Close on the 20x24 for New York magazine.
The pictures made by the 20×24 look like nothing else in the world. Because there is no enlargement of that immense negative, the resolution of the camera is unbelievable, particularly when it shoots a closeup of a face. You see not only hair in a subject’s beard, but the translucency of each individual hair, and the way its color varies slightly from root to tip, side to side. The unbelievably complex topography of human skin and the musculature beneath is laid bare. When the photos are shot on Polacolor film, the deeply saturated tones only add to the hyperrealism.
Close himself, in a 20x24 self-portrait.
You may recognize a lot of 20×24 photos without realizing you do. Andy Warhol used the camera; Chuck Close still does. Most of William Wegman’s most familiar photos of his Weimaraners were shot on the 20×24. Ditto Mary Ellen Mark’s jaw-dropping photos of twins. Aside from the scale, the distinctive drippy top edge to the print is its most recognizable feature, as is the upright orientation (you can’t exactly turn this camera on its side to shoot landscapes).
Ultimately, seven of these cameras were built, and five are still active, with a sixth brand-new one (implausibly, hearteningly) soon to join the bunch. They are immense: about the size of a refrigerator, albeit one on wheeled legs with a bellows that pulls out several feet. One of the five lives in New York, and gets the most work; the others are scattered around the world.
John Reuter is the minder of the camera that’s now in New York, and has been since 1980. He is a remarkable photographer (giant-Polaroid and otherwise), and a serious technician. When Polaroid shut down film production, he not only bought a multiyear stock of film; he also bought the machinery that makes the developer pods for that film, and eventually got it hauled off to a building in Connecticut, and then set about reinventing the formula for the reagant, which had to be reconstructed from several partial sources and the memories of some Polaroid retirees. He has succeeded magnificently in keeping this beast going, along with his assistant Jennifer Trausch—a true keeper of the instant-photography flame. The two of them even shot Lady Gaga last year.
As I say, there’ll be much more on this blog about 20×24 in the months to come.
Just discovered a pair of fellow Pola-enthusiasts in Chris and Katie, proprietors of Fading Nostalgia. Their latest project is a book of Polaroid photographs taking along the Big Road: Route 66, highway of mid-century vacation dreamers turned open-air museum of dusty, disappearing Americana. Needless to say, it’s perfect fodder for Polaroid film, itself a vanishing medium (as well as Impossible Project film, which they used for part of the project). Also, the Polaroid color palette—saturated color, soft greens, that unique blue dye—is a curiously excellent match for the sun-bleached signage of Route 66.
It’s a self-published project, and you can read about it and order here. I’m doing that now.
As digital photography becomes ubiquitous, analog photography becomes special, used at times when pixels just can’t do the job. And what’s more special than this loony-looking, wonderful project?
It’s a camera, now under construction by the photographer Dennis Manarchy, that shoots black-and-white negatives six feet high and four and a half feet across, carried in its own semi trailer. It’s a quixotic thing to be building in this era, but then good photographers are often quixotic people, and god knows most of them are seriously into their gear. This, I think it’s fair to say, takes that a step further. Possibly several steps. Why on earth build it? Because IT’S TOO COOL NOT TO.
Much more about it here. (Thanks to Bill Warriner for the link.)
Of course, Polaroid aficionados know all about giant-film photography, including one camera that makes photos even bigger than this one … I’ll be posting much more about that later in the week.
Your host with his brother, in our family backyard in New Jersey, March 5, 1981. Photograph by Peter Bonanos.
I'm the one on the right.
I’m not sure, but I may still have the hat.
I’ve written before about the powerful resonances between Steve Jobs’s Apple and Edwin Land’s Polaroid. You can read that story here, in the New York Times. But shortly after that op-ed ran, I found two photos that just startled me.
Here’s Land at a shareholders’ meeting, probably the one at which he introduced the SX-70 in 1972. (This is a screengrab from a film, but I believe the original photo is by Bill Warriner.)
Here’s Jobs, introducing the iPad in 2010. (Photo by Matt Buchanan, via Flickr.)
I mean, really. Same pose! Same Saarinen table! (Only the wardrobe differs: old New England vs. new California.) Uncanny.
Last week, I recounted the story of Type 41 film, and the close call it briefly caused at Polaroid. Today, we visit the humble little product that saved the day: print coater. (Click photos to enlarge.)
It came in a little tube packed with each box of film: glass in a cardboard sleeve in the early days, plastic later on (both versions are shown here).
In the tube, the swab was swimming in a viscous fluid (here, mostly dried up) that smelled fierce. You popped the cap, took it out…
…and then rubbed it, squeegee-style, over your photo. The liquid dried hard and (relatively) smooth, though you had to worry about sand or dust sticking to it while it was still wet.
Early on, the coater also came with a bit of treated flannel. You were supposed to use it to buff the dried, coated photos to a shine. (“Adds lustrous plastic finish.”) I don’t know exactly when the little polishing rag disappeared, but it was gone by the early sixties.
Print coater itself was on its way out by 1970. Around then, Polaroid introduced coaterless black-and-white film in a couple of formats, to much relief—coating prints was clumsy and messy. But certain older films in the professional and industrial product lines were never reformulated. Type 42 and 47 rollfilm stayed in production, with print coater, until 1992, and a few others lingered even longer, into the twenty-first century. When I am out shooting packfilm, folks with white hair still ask me whether I have to fix the prints I’ve just made, and they all make the same squeegee gesture over the picture as they describe it.
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.
