The Daily Whim
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Sun. Feb 10, 2008
The Death Of Emulsion and Redefining of Instant
Not that terribly long ago, to complete an advertising photography shoot, you required vendors for specific supplies and support. Typically, you might buy some Kodak EPR film stock in a large format (120mm, 4×5, 8×10), along with a similarly large format of Polaroid (Type 669, Type 55, Type 59), to allow for “instant” viewing on the set.
Locally, we often got these items at what was the flagship 14th Street store of Wolf Camera. After the film was exposed, we took it to one of the two professional E-6 labs in town, and two hours later, we had our final image.
Today, Kodak no longer makes EPR, the 14th Street location of Wolf Camera has been demolished, and the two pro E-6 labs in town both have “For Sale” signs on their buildings. As for Polaroid…
Polaroid Corp., the Massachusetts company that gave the world instant film photography, is shutting down its film manufacturing lines in the state and abandoning the technology that made the company famous.
“The Norwood plant is shutting down, and we will soon be winding down activities at the Waltham facility as well,” said Kyle MacDonald, senior vice president of Polaroid’s instant photography business segment.
The Norwood and Waltham plants make large-format films used by professional photographers and artists. Polaroid also makes professional-grade films in Mexico, and its consumer film packs come from a factory in the Netherlands. All these plants are slated for closure this year. Polaroid chief operating officer Tom Beaudoin said the company is interested in licensing its technology to an outside firm that could manufacture film for faithful Polaroid customers. If that doesn’t happen, Polaroid users would have to find an alternative photo technology, as the company plans to make only enough film to last into next year.
The Boston Globe: Polaroid shutting 2 Mass. facilities, laying off 150
I don’t know what the generational cutoff point might be, but a “Polaroid” used to represent a certain form of magic for many. Photojournalists often used to pack one along, especially overseas, as they could be used to entice kids and others to allow themselves to be photographed. A surefire way to get a kid to stand still for 60 seconds is to give them a freshly exposed Polaroid, and watch them marvel as the milky whiteness resolves into a murky image that then brightens and fills with color. It also allowed the photographer to offer a “tit-for-tat” ... I take your picture, but I leave you with a picture.
But it wasn’t just the SX70 end of things that had an impact (like SX70 manipulation), large format Polaroid was also used in “unintended ways,” like Polaroid transfers. People also would shoot a Type 55 black & white Polaroid, not for the print, but for the negative, which could be (if handled with care) printed or scanned like any other large format negative.
Need examples of this influence? Look at the very top of this page, that tab-like rough edged background for the text, “PHOTODUDE.COM”? That was meant to mimic a the top edge of a Polaroid transfer. Then look at the footer in the photo section. That’s meant to mimic the look of a Type 55 negative.
And that’s all we can do now, is mimic. Because soon, The Real Thing will be no more.
It was a case of technological advances redefining the terms of the marketplace. You might not recall, but at one time Polaroid sued Kodak over an “instant” photo process Kodak tried to market … and Polaroid won big. They owned the concept of “instant photography,” lock, stock, and little black barrel of fixer (remember that unique smell?)
But they’d always been able to define that on their own terms, and in relation to the old “drop it at the drug store and come back in a week.” Compared to that, well, 60 seconds isn’t a minute, it’s instant!
Unless you’re shooting twenty of them in an effort to nudge one final twig into place on your set, in a spot everyone agrees is just perfect. Until someone says, “I don’t know, can we rotate it clockwise five degrees and look at it again?” So you do, and shoot another ‘Roid, as we called them (Type 59 4×5 color Polaroids cost about $3 a pop). And wait another 60 seconds. Which can soon feel like a very long time.
So when Polaroid came out with a New & Improved professional Polaroid film that took 90 seconds to process, oh, you should have heard the whining! 90 seconds! That’s half an eternity more! In my experience, it was rarely used. Whatever benefit it provided, it wasn’t worth the extra 30 seconds. In fact, we’d often shoot a Type 55 B&W after rotating that twig 5 degrees, because it only took 25 seconds to process.
“Instant” becomes a very relative term. A year or so ago, I was talking to a local photographer, and he complained about a new camera not using Firewire. Why? Because he said USB made him wait a whole six or seven seconds for the image to transfer and render on the 24 inch monitor of his tethered computer.
I reminded him that was about one tenth of the time he used to whine about waiting for Polaroids (when I used to assist him, he was always pacing and looking over my shoulder at about 45 seconds, certain I could not be timing it right … “isn’t it done yet?”). He said that was entirely different. That was a three dollar Polaroid, and he’d paid thousands of dollars for all this gear…
But it’s not just the adults who want to see it now. My niece Caroli will be three this month, and the only kind of camera she’s ever known will “instantly” (in the truest childlike sense of that word) show her the picture that her Mom or Dad or I just took of her. Until she encountered Grandma’s camera. Grandma shoots film, and Caroli clearly seems vexed that she can’t see the picture like on our camera. And she’ll never know a Polaroid.
But even Grandma is having problems finding film cameras. She’s started using the disposable ones. The market for film, and Polaroid, has gotten so slim that it simply is no longer profitable to manufacture and distribute. Not even for pros. They barely accommodate Grandma.
We’ve learned that “instant” has a whole new meaning. And, sadly, it’s a lot faster than Polaroid could run.
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Film has become this generation’s vacuum tube
You know, my stepdaughter is taking photography at St. Edwards, and all they shoot is B&W 35mm. Digital isn’t allowed in their freshman year. Because of this, she’s learning the joys of the darkroom. And she really enjoys it. I just have to wonder, though, how long she’ll be able to use that training and indulge herself.
Todd, I remember taking trips to the hardware store with my Dad, where he would stand over a tube tester, and plug the various tubes from our TV into it, trying to find out which was FUBAR. Back when there was a chance you could fix your own TV. In somes way, progress is a mixed bag, eh?
Scott, your step-daughter is lucky, she’s getting a valuable foundation. There are concepts you learn in the darkroom that I don’t think you can learn as easily from digital. Photoshop is, in fact, a darkroom, but the concepts it uses come from a light passing through a negative and lens to expose an emulsion. The Burn and Dodge tools come straight out of the darkroom.
B&W film will be around a while yet, if we buy it and keep those Chinese and Eastern European plants running. As for vacuum tubes, I will be buying a pair on Monday.
I think in a lot of ways this kind of moaning about how change is bad feeds the very change that’s being griped about.
Film still works just fine for me and the pictures I make: it depends on what you do with it. Not everyone likes Mickey D’s nor does everyone like the same pictures everyone else takes. True instant picture technology doesn’t frame or compose an image (though I know some manufacturers are working on that). It doesn’t always know how to catch the crow in a snowfield or a white feather on a dark background. Sure you can use a preset and chances are it will be good, but you might as buy a postcard and save your money: it’s not your picture.
Nostalgia is fine but if this is a truly market-driven system, aren’t we the market? I don’t begrudge anyone their digital goodies — I wish I could add that to my bag of tricks — but if the choice is one or the other, I’ll keep using what I know and understand.
“I think in a lot of ways this kind of moaning about how change is bad feeds the very change that’s being griped about.”
While some might be moaning about these changes, I am not one of them. I spent more than enough winters in darkrooms with wet hands that felt like they would never ever be warm again. A dozen years ago when I attended the Olympics and put the results online, it was a slow laborious process to get a single image on the web.
I had to buy film beforehand, shoot the event, take it to the E-6 lab, come back in two hours to edit the film, and then take the selects to another vendor to be scanned in 24 hours. Something shot on a Thursday morning could not be uploaded in a digital form (at a whopping 640×480 resolution) until sometime Friday afternoon, with the help of three outside vendors, and a cost of about $25 per 36 images, plus $5 per scan.
Today, I can shoot a 12.6 megapixel image, transfer it “instantly” to view on my laptop’s screen, and with Internet access, upload it “instantly” as well. I personally can think of no reason for me to prefer the old process to what I have today.
“It doesn’t always know how to catch the crow in a snowfield or a white feather on a dark background. Sure you can use a preset and chances are it will be good, but you might as buy a postcard and save your money: it’s not your picture.”
But your film camera does not know how to expose a crow in a snowfield either. Both a film camera and a digital will try to meter the scene to 18% gray, and both will get it equally wrong. The knowledge of how to expose in such situations comes from your brain, and experience.
Granted, using film and a darkroom provide a type of experience and understanding of photographic principles that you do not get in the same way from digital processes. But you can still get them. You just lose the connection between a black board with a hole cut in the middle, and the “Burn” tool. Conversely, that black card with a hole in it does not have a selection to burn only “highlights, “midtones,” or “shadows.”
I feel very lucky that my career has bridged both sides of the analog-digital divide, and defintely agree it is best if you can learn from both. But I fear those days will soon be gone, given the speed of change over the past decade.
The demise of polaroid is sending screams of sadness and rage through the fine-art community. The artists who work in this medium do so because there are certain qualities about the material that can’t be duplicated with digital – I work in both and truly believe this.
It’s a sad day!
change the word ‘polaroid’ to ‘vinyl record’ in Erin’s reply, and read it again. it’s nothing new, and will repeat until the end of history.
Todd, true, but a little different. Audiophiles still claim vinyl LP’s have “certain qualities that can’t be duplicated with digital” ... but audiophiles do not make records, i.e. they are not an artist working within a medium that’s going away.
There are indeed things you can do with a Polaroid as a photographer than you cannot reproduce digitally. You can take an image into Photoshop and layer, distort, distress the edges, add noise, and desaturate it until it looks something like a Polaroid transfer … but it is not the same.
Not visually, and certainly not in a tactile sense.
The force that drives a lot of technological turnover is plain old greed. Manufacturers HAVE to get rid of old technology so they can sell everyone a replacement. You can’t maximize profits by selling mature products (35mm film and cameras) along side the latest digital model. This is especially true when the earlier technology (film) was superb, and the new technology isn’t better.
It would have been hard to make a lot of money selling the new CD technology along side the highly developed 33 rpm record technology.
For the most buck for the bang, you need to kill off the older industry. Get rid of it. Stop manufacturing 33 rpm records and record players. You want a new copy of a favorite title? Buy a CD player and a high-priced CD and its money in our pocket. Stop making film and the cameras that use it.
At some point in the not too distant future, the entire infrastructure surrounding CDs will be junked. Then all the old titles can be purchased all over again.
Much of the old equipment and media we remember so fondly WAS really great. We didn’t lose it because it was no good, we lost it because it stood in the way of making a lot of money.
I believe its called “creative destruction” in economic terms.
Mike Jefferis