In case you missed the memo, on February 8, 2008, Polaroid Corporation announced it would shortly discontinue all instant film production. The news, along with the already-discontinued production of instant cameras, has not boded well over the past few months, and could force everyone from crime scene photographers to modeling agencies into the digital age if nothing’s done by 2009.
The fine folk at Save Polaroid, however, are on a mission to rescue the beloved film. In addition to collecting testimonials, they’ve put together a campaign of sorts to convince Polaroid, Fuji, and Ilford of the need for continued production. From project co-founder Dave Bias’s essay:
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 [of] 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.
See Rob Walker’s NY Times op-ed piece for an insightful look at the cultural impact of Polaroid instant photography.
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