Frank Sinatra inspects an instant picture; Peter Lawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Mai “Mrs. Sammy Davis Jr.” Britt look on. Whoa. (Rollfilm camera with flash is on the table, as is its box; looks like a Model 80A. As if that’s the interesting part of this photo.)
It’s from a 2010 book with text by Shawn Levy, known for his earlier book Rat Pack Confidential. This one’s mostly photos, by ten guys who covered Sinatra and company in Los Angeles, and was produced in a limited and very expensive edition. If you have $950 to spend, or even more for the artier editions, you can buy it here; if not, enjoy Levy’s commentary about the photos here.
Jodie Foster at the 2013 Golden Globes. Photograph by Lucas Michael for New York magazine. (Click to enlarge.)
New York magazine’s Culture Pages, where I am an editor, is a regular host to another crazed Polaroid enthusiast. For last week’s issue, Lucas Michael used his Polaroid Big Shot to photograph Benjamin Walker, co-star of Broadway’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Then, this past Sunday night, he took on a high-wire assignment: New York posted him backstage at the Golden Globe Awards, just offstage in an awkward hallway, where he shot nearly every celebrity as he or she stepped offstage. (Michael brought several key things to Los Angeles, including three Polaroid Big Shot cameras; a ton of Fuji color film and vintage Magicubes; and Roxanne Behr, the Culture Pages’ supernally awesome photo editor.) The slideshow is a blast, and here it is. I especially like that we didn’t scan them as flat art; someone (Roxanne?) photographed the growing pile of prints and posted those images instead. Clever: it emphasizes the analog-ness of these little things, and also their quality as a physical object.
And I hate to mention the competition, but it’s too odd a coincidence not to cite: W magazine also had a Polaroid session going on at its pre-awards-show party. Anna Bauer worked with black-and-white film—dead-stock 4×5 Polaroid, most likely Polapan 100. Results here. I’m biased in favor of ours, of course, but hers look nice too.
JFK, photographed on April 23, 1960, in Medford, Oregon. In the left-hand photo, at extreme left in the trenchcoat, is Pierre Salinger. (Click to enlarge.)
I’ve written before about Mary Moorman’s Polaroid picture of the Kennedy assassination, and today Time’s Harry McCracken—a man who, judging by this post from a couple of years back, has the Polaroid bug almost as seriously as I do—posted about a small discovery he made on a trip to Oregon. In an antiques shop, he happened upon a pair of Polaroid photos of then-Senator John F. Kennedy, campaigning for president in 1960.
Unnervingly, he’s riding in a Lincoln Continental convertible, in the back seat, in almost the same pose we all know from photos taken in Dealey Plaza. (Jackie wasn’t along on this earlier trip.) Kennedy was driven around by the car’s owner, a local businessman named Wally Watkins who still lives in the area, and who talked to McCracken about the parade that day. (McCracken also checked in with me about the format and the missing border on one side of each photo; I’m of the opinion that they were trimmed down to fit into a frame or an album, facing each other.)
What’s especially touching, of course, is that not only was the photographer there with Senator Kennedy; these actual prints were, too. It’s fun to think that he might’ve taken one of them in hand, squinted at it, made a remark about the state of his suit or his hair, and handed it back to the photographer. Probably with a smile and a wink, if that person happened to be a girl.
For the hardcore Polaroid enthusiasts: The photos are on Type 47 film, imperfectly coated (see the streaks around the car’s windshield), probably shot without flash. The photographer is, of course, unknown, probably for good. When these things end up in a vintage shop, they typically are coming from an estate sale, and a lot of their history vanishes when the original owner does.
A few people (including Fast Company’s Co.Create blogger Paula Bernstein and Yahoo! Finance’s Daily Ticker Webcast) have been asking me what I think of Polaroid’s latest initiative. The Polaroid Fotobar is a retail space devoted to photo printing: a shop where you can print out photos and take them home, or order a large (or very large) print to be shipped to you in a few days.
It’s a fun idea, and the renderings of the stores look groovy. I’m not sure how the concept will do, though, because it hits some of the brand’s great strengths while missing others. The essence of Polaroid-ness, to me, falls into three categories: sharing, uniqueness, and instant gratification. On the sharing front, the Fotobar is a win: it creates a social space where people can meet up. As to uniqueness and immediate gratification, it’s not quite there: the standard printing service isn’t much different from what you can get at a Walgreens kiosk. If the Fotobar could produce framed poster-size prints on the spot, that’d be a big win, but it’d require a ton of large-format printing equipment, which is big and expensive. The three-day wait for shipment diminishes the appeal a lot: There won’t be a huge advantage to Polaroid that justifies paying retail rents instead of just running a Website. I’d also wager that a lot of people are going to expect too much of their cell-phone snaps: Many amateur photographers don’t have a sense of how much resolution their image files have, and a five-megapixel image blown up to poster size may be a tesselated disappointment.
That said, I like the idea, and I’d use it. So it gets a hopeful maybe from me. Other opinions welcome in the comments.
UPDATE, 1/29/2013: In a conversation with Fotobar executives today, I discovered that I have a couple of things wrong in this post. The Fotobar stores will indeed be able to produce a large-size print on the spot, which, to my thinking, vastly improves their appeal. (Really, they need to make that crystal-clear in every bit of publicity they get: It’s a major selling point.) And the service will not offer little 4×6 prints in the Walgreens manner. So: my enthusiasm for this enterprise just stepped up a couple of notches. Let’s see what happens next.
At 7 p.m., I’m going to be talking about Polaroid at Pacific Standard, a nifty Brooklyn bar that hosts lots of books-related events. It’ll be fun: It’s the final reading in a series run by the gentlemen of Dadwagon, a dadblogging site (sorry about that word, but it works) that I helped get off the ground. There’s free beer for the early arrivals, and even if you have to pay for yours, it’s the good stuff. Please join us. It’s at 82 Fourth Avenue, at the bottom of Park Slope.
Apologies for vanishing, these past couple of weeks: busy season at work, plus some outside jobs and lots of bookselling going on. A short roundup:
• The Paper of Record makes our existence official: we’re featured, at some length, on the New York Times’s Lens blog.
• Last Sunday’s Washington Post business section features a longish story I wrote about the lessons Eastman Kodak can take from its predecessor in bankruptcy.
• The interview with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show finally happened, after being deferred a week or so by Hurricane Sandy. You can listen to the results here.
• Another public-radio interview here, with WICN of Worcester, Massachusetts.
•And, finally, the smallest victory of the bunch, but one I love: I spotted the book in the window of the Paul Smith store on Fifth Avenue in New York, where I am a regular shopper. Smith is, fittingly enough, known for his colored stripes—same as a certain photography company. Here’s how INSTANT looked in the window:
Of course I had to shoot it with a Polaroid camera. That’s the Impossible Project’s excellent new PX680CPF film, by the way.
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.
