Replicate, Ad Infinitum

by Dave

Polaroid film and the process of making photographs with Polaroid film is inherently imperfect. The best of their cameras are sometimes wonky, often have simple or even plastic lenses and operate in a very non-standard way. The chemicals in the film often react in unpredictable ways to temperature, and as they age, the color shifts and other gremlins creep in, like streaking and lack of sharpness.

These imperfections make every Polaroid a unique piece, never to be replicated exactly.

We live in a world of endless replication, and especially in the music business (and soon in the film business) I think we’ve seen very clearly how the people of the world value things that can be duplicated and freely distributed at will with no real costs. Quite simply, we don’t value ubiquity. This is the future of the terabytes upon terabytes of “photos” that live in the ether – existing only because a tacit agreement that a certain sequence of ones and zeros makes a picture of grandma. They are doomed to valuelessness.

The Polaroid print has value. It has worth. It is real.

Far from being nostalgic or blindly obsessive – our campaign to save Polaroid from extinction is based on our ability to think beyond the all-consuming present and toward a time when we all realize how worthless those strings of ones and zeros have become.

The rest of this post is on my site