Save Polaroid

On February 8, 2008, Polaroid Corporation announced that it will discontinue production of all instant film. This site will document the aftermath of this announcement and will serve as a home-base for the effort to convince another company to begin producing the cherished technology that Polaroid has so carelessly abandoned.

This site is not about saving Polaroid, the company, rather the remarkable invention of Edwin Land, the instant film that made Polaroid a household name.

What We’ve Done So Far

Since this announcement, we’ve been assembling articles, links, stories and planning out the best way to create a joint effort to save instant film. We’ve contacted Polaroid, Fuji and Ilford about licensing. We have more in the works and will update this site regularly.

What Can You Do?

1. Join the flickr group. Upload your photo and a description of what Polaroid film means to you.
2. Download the Action Pack. It contains pre-addresed postcards to send to Polaroid, Ilford and Fuji with information about why Polaroid should license manufacturing rights to other companies. It also has flyers and other media to distribute to camera shops, film labs or anywhere else.
3. Write to Ilford and Fuji (or any other potential manufacturer) yourself. Nothing will convince a company to produce something more than the knowledge that there is a large market for it. Here are their addresses.
4. Sign the petitions. There is a list of them in the sidebar of this site.
5. Digg this site. Or blog it. Or add it to any of the bookmarking or social networks out there. It all helps.
6. Contact us with other ideas. If you have an idea, a skill, connections or any other way to help this effort, let us know.

Photo and words by Colie Parks

This is me, at a loss of words, after learning that Polaroid was shutting its doors on the production of all Instamatic film. Following this picture I frantically order 12 packs of 600 film - leaving me broke but happy….

Unlike many of my fellow Polaroid patrons I am new to this photographic format. As a graphics design junky I had always worked with digital. Shame on me!

It wasn’t until a few months ago when Raymond Molinar, friend and Polaroid guru, first introduced me to the elegance and simplicity of this medium. Immediately I fell in love with Polaroid and knew I had to become a part of this artistic community.

I know this may make me sound like a bit of a freak, but all the same it rings true to me: at times looking through the view finder of my sx 70 seems more meaningful than looking through my own eyes. There is something nostalgic and wistfully sentimental about the 3.5 x 4.2 framing of a Polaroid picture… and don’t even get me started on the developing process. watching an image develop in the short span of 2 mins is like witnessing a miracle take place, a moment in life being reborn, a supernatural event unfolding before my eyes.

It deeply saddens me to think about the possibility of this art form one day dying out, and I must admit that there have been times when I was tempted to cut down on my Polaroid usage in order to preserve my rapidly diminishing stash of 600 film. But being artistically conservative is basically the antithesis of the Polaroid manifesto!

Edwin Land provided the world with the truest form of photography, one that mirrors life itself: instant, tangible, and un-edited.

LONG LIVE POLAROID!

Photo and words by lisa anne

Many things have come and gone from my life but Polaroids, although instant, have remained a permanent part of me and what I enjoy most; photography.

I love Polaroids. I love the shape, the smooth surface where the photo appears, the crunchy sound of the shutter, the ‘beep’ to tell me that I have (sadly) taken my 10th shot, even the look of an empty box sitting on my bed.

To me, Polaroid is about capturing a moment and being able to look at it right after it happened. It’s about instant gratification and accessibility. It’s about watching a memory develop right before your own eyes. It’s about clicking the shutter whenever you see something inspiring or funny, believable or unbelievable, beautiful or ugly, unique or ordinary.

I am truly saddened that I won’t have one of my several Polaroid companions by my side for much longer. All I can do is hope that it won’t be out of reach in the future.

Although Polaroids are instant, they create permanent stories. Each and every Polaroid I have taken, probably thousands, has meant something to me, and I’m happy to know that Polaroids mean more than just a simple snapshot to others, too.

Want to help save instant film? Tell us what films and cameras you use by taking our survey. We’ll use this information to better understand the market and guide us in our efforts to convince another company to manufacture some of the films that are being lost.

The survey is just 19 questions and requires no login.

Take the Survey

Photo and words by Dan Marshall

Because watching the latent image appear in the tray or on the film is what got us addicted in the first place. Because you can’t intimidate anyone with a polaroid camera. Because there is joy in the simple, tactile experience. Because the process can sometimes be as important as the final result. Because digital isn’t the answer to everything. Because running across an old polaroid of your kids while searching for something in your dresser drawer floors you in a way that calling up digital files on your computer never will.

Photo and words by A. Skwish

One of the things I have always heard is that photographers use the camera to put a barrier between themselves and the rest of the world, To be an observer rather than participant. Now I don’t know if it is true or not but it seems like a reasonable assumption. I think I picked up a Polaroid with this assumption in my head. Not being comfortable with groups, a bit shy perhaps, I thought that a camera in hand would protect me from having to make small talk. I could just quietly take a few photos, smile now and then and be left alone.

I sure picked the wrong camera. Everyone wanted their picture taken. Wanted to see how all the shots turn out. Wanted to try the camera. Wanted to talk about the camera. I was anything but left alone.

I found that the shots I wanted to take were primarily close-ups. I would stand right up on top of folks smelling the remnants of their dinner, breathing in the sweat of their day, hold the camera six inches from their face and blind them with the flash. It would thrill them. It would thrill me.

I met this woman. She was my neighbor. She noticed all the Polaroids.

She called me to ask a favor. She was moving and had built an elaborate series of shelves out of cinder blocks and planks of wood and was leery of her abilities to reconstruct it in her new home from memory. She asked if I could stop by and take a Polaroid of it. I was happy to oblige.

That was five years ago.
Polaroid helped me get the girl.

A story by Grant Hamilton

Polaroid cameras are magical. In my pocket, I carry a medium-format single lens reflex camera that folds flat. It never needs batteries because they are in the film pack–each new cartridge provides 10 sheets of film and the power to develop them. When I press the red button on my 30 year-old SX-70, a sonar wave is sent out from the camera to measure the distance to my subject. As the bounced wave returns to the camera, the auto-focus adjusts the lens within a fraction of a second. Next, sophisticated electronics calculate the amount of light needed to properly expose the picture and the aperture and shutter-speed are set. The fresnel lens that had been redirecting the light to the viewfinder, flips up to reveal a mirror on its undersurface. This mirror reflects the incoming light downward onto the film. Once the film is exposed, it is ejected from the front of the camera. As it exits, it is squeezed through two rollers that spread the developing chemicals from their storage pod at the base of the photo. They move the acidic paste over the silver crystals like a rolling pin flattening dough. Polaroid integral film is made up of 13 different layers. These layers regulate the chemicals that create full-color photograph from just three different dyes. After the photo is outside the camera, the developing image is protected by a temporarily opaque timing layer that prevents over-exposure. The dissolution of that shield slowly reveals the underlying picture. Like the moment it captures, each Polaroid photo is unique. There are no negatives and no memory cards. When I carry my Polaroid, I can transform the ethereal into the tangible. That is magic.

For those who haven’t seen it, two of us appeared on ABC World News Tonight to talk about Polaroid film.

Correspondent John Berman, and his producer, Susie Bonikarim, were very sympathetic and spent a good amount of time interviewing us - but ultimately, it was mistakenly stated in the piece that Anne and I started SavePolaroid.com. This despite our efforts to point out that we were simply part of a team.

So if you’re visiting SavePolaroid because of the ABC piece, we just wanted to set the record straight that SavePolaroid.com was started by Sean Tubridy and that the rest of us are indebted to his initiative. All six of us are a true team in this effort, and I apologize if I was at all unclear to the news crew on this fact.

Despite this small error, we are all deeply appreciative of the effort by Susie and John to get us on the air. With baseball players lying to Congress, a certain NY governor unable to keep it in his pants, and the horrible news that 4000 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, our little story was put into stark perspective and we were truly humbled that our piece made it through the noise to reach a national audience.

You can see the video here >>

(German-born artist Stefanie Schneider is one of many artists whose work is inseparable from their chosen medium - Polaroid film. The beauty of her work is one of the very reasons we have taken on the challenge of saving this irreplaceable film. -Eds)

It’s an era ending again. No more family pictures developing in front of the children’s eyes. A piece of beauty disappearing… a piece of culture. Polaroid material has the most beautiful quality - the colors on one side, but then the magic moment in witnessing the image to appear. The time stands still and the act of watching the image develop can be shared with the people around you. In the fast world of today it’s nice to slow down for a moment. At the same time Polaroid slows time, it also captures a moment which becomes the past so instantly that the decay of time is even more apparent - it gives the image a certain sentimentality or melancholy. Because of that intensity of the moment it seems to change the interaction of the next moment. The Polaroid moment is one of a kind, an original every time.

Is there any way to save this??

Stephanie’s website
29 Palms, CA - a feature film / art project on polaroid
Interview with Stephanie on The Huffington Post

(Paul Giambarba was the creator of the iconic look of Polaroid packaging through the 60’s and 70’s. The 7-color stripe? That’s him… We asked him to say a few words. -Eds.)

Don’t be too tough on the CBS guys. They taped 120 minutes of my reactions to their questions about Polaroid and tossed 119. Dan Sieberg asked the same questions over and over so he could get good takes. I have no problem with their editing since my 25 years of experience with Polaroid go back over 50 years. It was a different world then.

I once took one of their one-piece plastic bottom-of-the-line models called the Big Shot, which was made for color film and flash, and used the high speed 3000 speed B&W film to shoot some mugs of my 5-year-old son. Then I took the same photos with a Polaroid back attached to a Hasselblad 500C with a 150mm. Sonar lens, matted them both and went around asking which was the Big Shot photo and which was the Hasselblad shot. Nobody got it right.

This is a photo of my son taken later with an off-the-shelf Colorpack II, simply set one stop to Lighten. It appeared in my book “How To Take Better Polaroid Instant Pictures.”

Every one of my photos was taken with an off-the-shelf Polaroid camera, mostly Model 100, and two or three with a Model 195 and a few with the aforementioned Colorpack II. Personally I thought that the Model 100 Series Polaroid cameras were their best products and produced the best photos.

Everyone can thank Ladybird Johnson for the SX-70. She got on Land’s case about Polaroid pull tab trash that littered the National Park system so much so that he had to invent a self-contained photo. He insisted on white packaging and that it be promoted like a religious experience. If I correctly recall, the ad inserts in LIFE and TIME began “In the Beginning . . .”

Everyone had to love the SX-70 and I was one of the few who could not understand why. The photos were not sharp, and the greens were acidy, IMO. But those were the early 1970s.

I can’t recall that anyone ever did an SX-70 how-to-book before they tied the can to me in 1983. Polaroid had fallen on hard times by then, pulling my work inhouse, taking out telephones, and requiring several phone calls to Accounts Payable. (One of Polaroid’s great virtues had been paying almost immediately after sending in an invoice.)

My site is giambarba.com - and the branding blog is here.