Click here, and expect to stay awhile: A Shed Full of Polaroids.
Julia Henderson’s father was an executive at Polaroid until his death in 1988, when Julia was 9. Last year, she moved from New York to California, and finally confronted the thousands and thousands of Polaroid photos—mostly of Julia and her sister Amy, with some of the rest of the family mixed in—that her mother had been storing in a backyard shed. Every day, she posts one picture, with wry, sometimes touching, often hilarious commentary. If you grew up in the seventies and eighties, the texture of everyday American life you’ll see here is enough to keep you looking for a long time. (The kitchen wallpaper we all had. My god.) If that doesn’t resonate with you, the mini-essays (all lowercase) that accompany each one certainly will.
A few samples, with excerpts:
“yes, those coats are far too large for us. this was a thing when we were little. we were constantly being given coats and clothes that were too big. and i don’t mean a little too big. i mean a lot too big. somehow some residual depression-era who knows when we’ll be able to afford this again mentality had trickled down through my grandparents and into my parents and there we were, in the booming 80’s, being given stuff we could grow into so that it would last longer.”
“this is a little girl with big delusions. i honestly thought i was alice in wonderland when i wore that dress. it was, after all, called my alice in wonderland outfit and it always included the tights, the shoes, and the ribbon in the hair. you can blame my mother, she’s the one who planted that seed in my head and got the ball of delusion rolling. of course, as the laws of physics tell us, that ball will only pick up speed as it rolls down hill. and pick up speed it did.”
“all i ever wanted was this – curls. unfortunately, the only way for me to achieve these curls was with rollers. those pink plastic rollers with the teeth. not only did it take an act of congress for my mother to get them on my head… with my thin, fine hair drying and needing to be sprayed with the water bottle so that maybe, just maybe, if she ever succeeded…a curl would take hold, she tried to get me to give up the ghost, to admit then that this was not worth the pain.”
“this is me & my dad. the first day of my life, the first day we had together. if only i knew then how short our time together would be. here i am, just a few moments into this thing called life, and we only have 9 years and counting. it’s going to fly by. and he’ll be gone before i know it. at least though we didn’t waste any time in getting to know one another. from the very beginning, i knew him. i saw him and i knew him. and every moment counted.”
Lots of thoughts about this, of course. (Polaroid people lived through it, twice, and it was awful. I hope Kodak’s pensioners come out of this better than Polaroid’s did.) Lots of coverage, as you’d expect, in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, Kodak’s hometown paper.
Just one statistic: Kodak at its peak, circa 1985, had about 130,000 employees (one source says 145,000). Now it’s 17,000, and that number’s almost surely going to drop further.
I’ve said my piece over at New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, and welcome any of you who are coming from that link.
I think it’s fair to say that the last time the word “Polaroid” was everywhere was 2003, when the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast released “Hey Ya.” It wasn’t just the song of the summer; it was the song of an entire year, ubiquitous on the air and in the mall, one of the last true mega-hits before the music business caved in on itself. It had an incredibly catchy, propulsive bass-and-synth groove at its core that keeps you bopping along, and the video riffs on an Ed Sullivan Show–ish TV appearance by the band (digitally turned into a foursome). And, of course, there was the bridge, built around a sexed-up line that every kid knew: “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
I’m not going to get into the whole don’t-shake-your-Polaroid-photos thing here; it’s been done to death. (Short recap: They don’t develop any faster, and you can crack ’em.) It’s like being the guy on Millennium Eve who kept insisting that the real turn of the century was at the start of 2001. He may have been right, but he missed out on a really big party.
Outkast’s Pola-moment starts at 3:53, but really, you should play the whole thing. It’s a perfect pop-meets-hip-hop song, the guys’ wardrobe is just great, and the production design is awesome.
My friend Emily recently asked me, at a party, whether this song comes up in the book. I was happy to tell her that it’s on page 1.
The title says it all. He’s tweeting.
Or rather, was. Seems to have gone quiet as of September. Come back, Din!
Last year, I picked up a Spectra camera through Craigslist, and it had a half-pack of expired film inside. It was at least a few years past its sell-by date, and I had no expectations that it would work at all. I don’t think I even intended to compose a photo; I just opened the camera and randomly pressed the shutter, and it sprang to life. Three minutes later I had this:
Well, I think it's nice.
I had been standing in front of a closet shelf, and those are rolls of paper towels. As for the problems: the stripes come from unevenly aged pods of developer paste. The irregular greenish blobs at the top are areas where the negative is showing, because the paste didn’t spread all the way to the top of the photo. Technically, it’s a terrible picture; subjectively, it’s a keeper.
(Update: My wife just saw this photo, and said, “Froot Loops!” I think we have a title.)
While researching the book, I managed to obtain (don’t ask; it involved cash and a very long drive) a bound set of Polaroid’s in-house newspaper.
There are a LOT more volumes than this.
First called the Polaroid News Letter, then the Polaroid Newsletter, and later the Polaroid Update and briefly Viewpoint, the newspaper grew in polish and gloss over the years, while hanging onto a small-town quality. (I just opened the 1989 volume at random, and learned about Polaroid’s Ultimate Frisbee team.) The set runs from 1957 to 1994; don’t know whether it lasted past that point.
Someone did this project up nicely, with leather-trimmed bindings and heavy, creamy endpapers. There’s a loopy (in both senses) cursive logotype stamped in gold on the cover.
I’ll be posting curios from these pages as they bob up. Just for kicks, here’s a bit about the 1958 Christmas party, with your host, Dr. Edwin Land. Not to mention “his singing assistant, Alberta Cochran.”
Click to enlarge and read.
Google doesn’t turn up much beyond a few phone-book listings for that name (though I did just learn that Alberta, Canada, contains a city called Cochrane).
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.
