A Heartfelt, YouTube-Based Wake for Polaroid Instant Photography
 |
Then it dawned on me: While I took Polaroid photos well into the 1990s, it's been years since I last used my camera...and come to think of it, I have no idea where it is and am not positive I still own it. And reading coverage of the film plant shutdown, I learned that the company stopped making cameras a year ago. I didn't notice at the time, which is probably a sign that I don't really have the right to be livid about the film going away.
Still, it's a sad day. I don't really need to explain why the once-iconic Polaroid instant camera was rendered obsolete: When photography went digital in the late 1990s, all cameras became instant cameras in most respects that mattered. Poor Polaroid became an anachronism; thousands of people at the Cambridge, Massachusetts company that was an icon of my Boston-area youth lost their jobs.
But in the great scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago that Polaroid was the coolest consumer-electronics company going. I was eight years old when the Polaroid SX-70--the first instant camera that shot a photo out of the camera with no work needed on the part of the photographer--was released. And I have vivid memories of lusting after a family friend's SX-70. At $180, it was an extremely pricey gadget for the early 1970s, but it was a beautiful-looking piece of machinery (parts of the case were made of real leather!) and what it did felt closer to magic than any piece of personal technology I can think of.
Polaroid in its heyday reminds me of Apple--it was a company led by a charismatic, long-serving leader (Edwin Land) that made slick, innovative, somewhat pricey gadgets. And in decidedly Apple-esque fashion, it marketed them really well. So looking at a few vintage Polaroid commercials is an entirely appropriate way to mourn the end of Polaroid photography. Thanks to YouTube, we can do that right here.
Back in 2005, we named a 1965 Polaroid model called the Swinger as the 43rd greatest gadget of the last 50 years. I'm too young to remember the camera; actually, I never heard of it until we began to plan the article. But I vividly remember a coworker, about a decade older than me, passionately argue for its greatness. And it had a TV commercial that sported both a catchy jingle and a pre-Love Story Ali McGraw...
Here's another 1960s commercial, from back when taking Polaroid pictures involved peeling the print apart and (at least if you were me) accidentally getting chemcials on your hands that left your hands with a weird burning sensation...
One of the many interesting things about the SX-70 was its ad campaign, which featured the only commercial endorsement ever made by Sir Laurence Olivier. I wish I could find an example to embed here. But I can't.
So I'll skip on to the best-remembered Polaroid ads of all: The 1970s ones for the OneStep--basically, a cheap version of the SX-70--that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Garner was a star, Hartley wasn't (though the commercials made her into a pseudo-celeb), and people supposedly interpreted the spots' famously influential banter as evidence that they were married to each other. Which they weren't.
Note that the following commercial touts the OneStep for features that reduced the chances that you'd waste film. Remember when we had to worry about wasting film?
Here's another. I haven't seen these in three decades, but watching them again, the rhythms of the dialog and the bouncy theme song are flooding back into my brain...
This one features Hartley sans Garner and Mentos-esque hijinks, and is neither funny nor memorable.
This one isn't funny, but I think I kind of remember it. Is that Hartley we see only in a silent glimpse, or a lookalike?
This later ad for a OneStep spinoff called the Sun camera has a slightly fantastic premise and some special effects, plus bonus 1981 commercials at the end...
The OneStep was a smash, but at the same time it was flying off the shelves, Polaroid released a product so unsuccessful it did grave financial damage to the company: Polavision, its instant movie camera. It was a great idea--except that the movies were silent. And you had to watch them on a little desktop screen. And it arrived at the same time that home video revolution was rendering it kind of pointless. At least Polaroid hired Danny Kaye to do the commercials...
Time out for a 1977 ad that isn't for a Polaroid...but is relevant o this post. It's for the Handle, one of the Polaroid wannabees produced by Kodak until Polaroid successfully sued the company for patent violation and forced it to stop manufacturing both the cameras and the film. The Handle looks pretty ungainly, and as I think about it, I seem to remember looking upon it with contempt at the time as an inferior knockoff of slick Polaroid products like the OneStep. And it looks like even the ads were kind of cheesy...
By the early 1980s, Santa had apparently left the employment of Eastman Kodak to work for Polaroid...
Here's a 1981 ad with the Muppets whose mention of the camera as costing fifteen pounds shows it was aired in the U.K. But my Muppet-expert friend Andrew Leal of Muppet Wiki tells me that it was probably originally shot for U.S. use...
Being in Polaroid commercials was apparently a surprisingly effective springboard to greater fame. We've already seen Ali McGraw and Mariette Hartley; here's Hugh "House" Laurie in a 1980s ad, back when having a computer inside a camera was something to brag about...
By the 1980s, Polaroid was slapping its name on products that didn't relate to instant photography--it eventually made (gasp!) 35mm film. Here's an ad for Polaroid video cassettes with Vincent Price, proving that stars appeared in Polaroid commercials on the way down as well as on the way up...
I think maybe the last Polaroid I owned and used was a Spectra, which, at the time I bought it, was a fairly major purchase for me. And a lot of fun...
The start of the end of Polaroid wasn't the digital camera--it was one-hour photo labs, which let you get much nicer photos than a Polaroid could produce without all that much extra wait. This 1989 commercial has a slightly defensive feel about it, I think...
In 1998, digital photography was starting to take off, and Polaroid--in what might have been an act of desperation--released the Spice Cam, a model endorsed by the Spice Girls. It used film you could draw on. And the ads starred...well, you can figure it out. (Here's Scary Spice.)
The 1999 Polaroid model called the I-Zone was a last-gasp sort of product whose name suggested an Internet angle of some sort, although as far as I remember, there wasn't one...
This at least sort-of recent Polaroid commercial (helmed by movie director Michael Gondry) was one of several in the brand's later years that tried too hard to be hip. The message is apparently that Polaroid cameras are good for offending your coworkers with...
Whew--that's a lot of commercials. Which, in total, provide a pretty good portrait of the rise and fall of a great American technology brand.
Polaroid may be out of the instant photography business, but the company lives on as a shell of its former self, licensing its name for use on products such as HDTVs and DVD players. I find most uses of the venerable, once-great brand on generic technology products to be embarrassing at best--can anyone tell me why it makes sense to sell a Polaroid GPS unit? But there's one modern Polaroid product that I can get at least a little excited about: Its pocket-sized photo printer, based on technology from a company called Zink. It's a unique way to get photos instantly--and hey, Zink was founded by refugees from Polaroid.
Still, I feel a twinge of sadness each time I see the Polaroid name on a modern product. The real Polaroid's technological innovations brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people for several decades...and watching these commercials again sure reminded me just how much Polaroid cameras meant to me for a long time.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
The saddest thing is actually the number of photographers who are still doing AMAZING things with Polaroid film. Sure, I'm a Kodak kid, who will probably mourn the slow progressive death of film until it gasps its last breath, but there are some things you can't replicate with the precision of digital combined with a photo editor. We are watching an art form disappear right in front of us, and few people are even batting an eye.
No eye batting here. Polaroid film was great in its day, and I'm even a little sad to see it go, but I will gladly trade it for today's technology! Bye bye old friend, RIP.
I worked for Polaroid from '89 to '99. At the time it was recognized that instant imaging (the Polaroid way!) was on the way out. The company tried to innovate into new product areas and had a top notch microelectronics research group (MEL) in Cambridge. We worked on 3/5 laser diodes for a new medical xray printer using lasers for creating the image; our sister group worked on CCD imagers for digital cameras. By the early 90's they had demonstrated a megapixel imager and image compresion algorithms. The corporation pulled the plug on the Si side ( I think in '95) because to quote"digital imaging has no future" - per our VP of technology. What he meant was that the company couldnt see how digital cameras would increase film burn. Shortsighted at best. By the late 90's the corporation was selling assets to stay afloat and by the end of the decade had divested the laser diode group and fiber laser (how many folks knew that PD made fiber!) and numerous other ops to stay alive.
What you young'uns don't know is that Polaroid was once _the_ technology company, and Dr. Land was its master magician magician. (See the 10/27/1972 issue of LIFE.) Steve Jobs doesn't come close. The SX-70 -- one of the greatest inventions of all time -- was his magnum opus. Unless the space elevator is built, we will never see anything like it again.
Early in 1974, when the SX-70 was still a novelty, I had dinner with a friend, and we went into an ice cream store for desert. I took a picture of him with his cone, standing against a pink-and-silver wall. As you might imagine, everyone in the store gathered around to watch the magic.
Try that with a digital camera.
They could sell the rights to the film & cameras for someone to build in China. It would be much cheaper because the toxic chemicals required for film production could be washed directly into the water supply. There is also no need to protect employees from such chemicals. These factors could provide every day low cost for American consumers. Im sure somebody will steal my idea.
When I was a kid in the 1950's I used to tote around a Polaroid bellows camera almost as big as I was. Instant pictures and 3000 speed film were magical. It's true that digital has killed film, instant or otherwise, but digital cameras still don't give you an instant print to hand around or give away seconds after shooting, anywhere in the world.
I worked at Polaroid, at Tech Square in Cambridge MA, in 1978-79.
I was hired as a temp to clean out a warehouse, and assist with the stockroom that supplied the engineers working on the sonar focusing system and other goodies for the upcoming SX-70. The warehouse, the entire top floor of a building, was filled with what was left of the Polavision project. Tabletop calculators from the early '60s (that were big enough to fill the top of a table), obsolete parts, cables, etc. - it was all to be salvalged. Polavision was dead in the water.
We got to take home a prototype camera every weekend, take some pictures, and return them temporarily for evaluation (no private pictures!). I was officially presented with a prototype, which broke after a while and got lost in the fog of time.
I got to meet Dr. Land briefly - he was a great scientist, but probably not the greatest businessman.
I don't mourn the passing of a dead technology, but it was a great troup of people to work with.
I was a professional advertising photographer in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Got a call from an ad agency to come to their offices. They showed me a strange looking camera and how it worked. They instructed me to take several sets of photos jiggling the camera on first shots and steady on following shots. One of the sets was of my infant daughter (now 59) and puppy. The prints were sepia tone. The ad agency selected the baby photos. These photos were in the first instruction booklet for the first Polaroid camera.
sandysachs
I worked in Polaroid's digital imaging group in the late 80's and early 90's. As mentioned above we were prepared to unveil the world's first megapixel color camera at the Fotokina exposition in Cologne, Germany in the fall of 1990. The demo was scuttled at the last moment. The reason was that it wasn't supposed to be a camera but a printer. The "in house name" for the project was in fact PIF for "printer in field." The minature print head was unforunately MIA. It is interesting that the concept for the printer was very similiar to the recently announced Zink printer. Not suprisingly some of the same Polaroid folks who were around 20 years ago are still involved today.
As part of the original demo we added a small LCD screen to preview the image. Efforts to patent the concept went nowhere. Why? Well ,"why would anyone want an electronic preview when you could have an instant print?" I think that pretty much sums up the company approach to digital imaging in that era.
I am truly amazed that it took this long before Polaroid took this long to bag it in on this product and technology.
I worked for Polaroid from 98-99 in the Graphics Imaging Division (PGI). You could tell that the mother company was falling, and falling fast. The division was sold in 1999 to an outside investor, and we've soldered on now under a different name, but still the core of the employees are Polaroid old-timers.
In many ways I feel deeply saddened to read this, but it was expected. The management did not want to impact their "core product" film, and didn't make use of the brilliant engineers they had working there that really could have pushed the threshold with digital technology.
The division that I worked for, made use of the technology from the Medical Imaging Systems group (PMIS). This technology is live and well, and still in operation around the world.
I am very sad to see Polaroid close down thier instant film business completely. We still use Polaroid film every year for our children's Christmas party. We give each child a picture of them sitting on Santa's lap, so it will be disappointing once we can no longer do that for them. I worked at Polaroid for 23 years from 1976-1999, and made many friends along the way and have many memories of the fun we had throughout the years. The best times were when we were asked to work overtime making movies with the "Polavision", we made some pretty silly movies and got paid to do so. I could go on and on, but it would take hours. I am deeply saddened to see the instant film industry come to an end for Polaroid and truly thought it would never die out completely! Thank you Polaroid for all the good years and here's to Dr. Land for making it all possible! Cheryl Endicott
I was a kid in the 50's & found a broken Polaroid in the street. I sent it to POLAROID & hey completly rebuilt it including new lense & leather strap for $12. I was an insurance adjuster for 35 years & my Polaroid was invaluble for procesing claims.I will miss a really old & good product. BigD february 11, 2008
Nice YouTube-based tribute!
It's a shame, really. There's something special about 4x5" candid prints while-u-wait. I had an old bellows-lens Land camera once, that I rescued from a messy student office. Lost in latest yard sales? Never did use it.
Still, the ultra-compact photo-printers kinda make up for it. Someone will eventually come up with an ultra-portable digital camera/printer combo, and it'll all start over again...
LOOKING FOR J 33 FILM
Back when the instant 35mm film came out my sister was getting married. I recorded a soundtrack for a slide show including commentary on the wedding day. During the day I took shots to fit my pre recorded soundtrack. The minute the cake was cut I went around to a mates place, we processed the film and mounted the shot. We put them in order and went around and set up the sound system and slide projectors at the reception. My sister expected that to happen and it went through them growing up etc and up to a few days before. THEN it got to the wedding day and there was my sister getting ready, the wedding, the photos and cutting the cake. The guests were totally silent and my sister cried for the first time all day. No-one could imagine how we got slides up on the screen so quick. It was priceless and worth every cent to buy the processor and film. It was never used again but we had our money's worth. It can't be appreciated today but it was like magic back then.
Wayne Bertram, Australia
Polaroid instant pictures were a cool novelty in my younger years, but the film was quite expensive and it was very difficult to make duplicate prints from Polaroid photos because there weren't any negatives.
Personally, my favorite Polaroid memory is the Mariette Hartley-James Garner commercials of the '70s. They were so funny, and Polaroid's ad agency had the good sense to make Mariette the smart half of the duo.
I am devastated polaroid has lost its identity. are the digital cameras they make even that popular? i had a polaroid brand dvd player and it was a piece of JUNK. the only useful, most iconic and identifiable product polaroid has made was the instant camera.
what about all the people who use polaroids to take photos of kids with the easter bunny or santa? or people in the fashion industry who use polaroids to catalogue inventory? who wants to deal with printing a photograph when you can get the image instantly?
my concern: you can't recreate the look of a polaroid. not even in photoshop. nothing digital comes remotely close to the QUALITY, one-of-a-kind image you get with a polaroid. artists still use this medium. think of what creative works we will be deprived of in the future.
why hasn't polaroid tried to make a comeback before now? don't they realize how many people still depend on instant film? think polaroid is dead? go to flickr.com and search "polaroid." ~jena ardell~
I am devastated polaroid has lost its identity. are the digital cameras they make even that popular? i had a polaroid brand dvd player and it was a piece of JUNK. the only useful, most iconic and identifiable product polaroid has made was the instant camera.
what about all the people who use polaroids to take photos of kids with the easter bunny or santa? or people in the fashion industry who use polaroids to catalogue inventory? who wants to deal with printing a photograph when you can get the image instantly?
my concern: you can't recreate the look of a polaroid. not even in photoshop. nothing digital comes remotely close to the QUALITY, one-of-a-kind image you get with a polaroid. artists still use this medium. think of what creative works we will be deprived of in the future.
why hasn't polaroid tried to make a comeback before now? don't they realize how many people still depend on instant film? think polaroid is dead? go to flickr.com and search "polaroid."
jena