These aren’t really Polaroids. I know they look like a stack of Polaroid pictures, but in reality they’re just a little Picasa 2 magic. Pick a folder, click the button, and all your pictures pile up like a mid 70s post-Christmas coffee table. It’s quick. It’s fun. It’s technology.
You might as well have a jumble of digitally fake Polaroids, because ladies and gentlemen – this time next year you won’t be able to take a real Polaroid picture. That’s right. The company is shutting down factories that produce the instant film and whatever’s out there may be all that’s left.
Can you imagine?
I don’t want to sound curmudgeony, but that’s real family history we’re watching disappear. Holidays in the 60s weren’t complete without a hundred double-exposed pictures covering the stereo cabinet, the dining room table, the top of the TV, every flat surface, just waiting to develop.
And the shake – remember that? I’m not completely sure why we shook the pictures while they developed, but everyone did. The earliest of them had a strange pink squeegee-looking tool that spread some sort of noxious chemical over the picture to…well, what was it for? I don’t remember, but it was mighty important for us not to touch those Christmas pictures until Dad said they were dry.
A digital picture can be deleted at the source, or kept and manipulated using scads of different software. I can take digital pictures of The Perfect Grandson and turn his eyes from blue to green, or I can cut and paste the Loch Ness monster in the background and tell him he went to Ireland as an infant. Anything is possible, even if it shouldn’t be.
A Polaroid picture is truth, warts and all. There’s something comforting in producing something and then leaving it as it is. Digital manipulation is always its own state of flux because it can be endlessly altered. There is art, however, in timing the one perfect click and watching a Polaroid photograph bloom right in front of you. After that click, you’re a spectator.
There are some folks out there mad or sad enough to do something about it. At Save Polaroid they’ve already given up trying to get the company to keep manufacturing film. Instead, the Save folk are splaying themselves out over all sorts of digital media in an effort to convince someone – anyone – to buy the plants and keep making the film. There are TV appearances, photoblogs, online social networks, and a website full of petitions (signed digitally), but I don’t hold out much hope.
If Polaroid can’t make money they won’t make the film, and neither will anyone else. That’s just business.
Until all the film is gone, I think I’m going to hoard a little. Maybe put together a Polaroid photo essay and eulogize a photographic era.
No Telling 
It’s like you’re inside my head, crawling around there. The timeliness of this is just bizarre.Just last night I stopped at the local WalMart for some Polaroid 600 film. I did this for very convoluted reasons that may make sense if you read strikethru’s blog.But so anyway, the lady at the counter just wouldn’t shut up about my purchase: “I can’t believe people still have machines that take this film,” she says, zapping the UPC with her laser gun. “I can’t believe they still make the *film*!”I should be used to it because of all my trips to Office Max for typewriter ribbons. But usually there it’s some disinterested teenager who doesn’t have any clue what it is I’m buying.
Wow. So my potential-future children are not going to get why the pictures of their daddy as a little boy in his underwear standing my their grandma in her periwinkle housecoat with coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other by the Christmas tree has the funny white trim around the edges. And they aren’t going to get the hook of that catchy Outkast song–“shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture.”The things we take for granted…
Tim, I want to see that very picture posted on your blog. I mean it. Actually, it should be a design element. Seriously. Oh, Duffy. I AM crawling around in your head. It’s a spooky gypsy-mojo thing. Just ask my ex, who always said I was a witch. Wait, maybe he said bitch. I can’t remember.I guess I’m going to be in line today buying up film. And I HATE going to Wal-Mart.
Dammit, Timothy, you stole my Outkast line. I felt so witty when I thought of it, too. Now, I got nothing…
Curmudgeony is SUCH a great word… I need to use that more often.
Oh and yeah, save Polaroids!
We need to have wrist bands made up, just like they do for saving the polar bears (who, by the way, can eventually breed and replicate themselves – unlike the poor Polaroid).