Awards in Focus
Camera does the rest
When Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid,
gave the first public demonstration of instant,
or one-step photography in 1947, the New
York Times headline the next day read: “You
Press the Button…and the Camera Does
the Rest”. The famous Eastman Kodak
slogan of 1888 – “We do the rest” – had
promised to free the amateur photographer
of all responsibility but framing and capturing
the image: Kodak loaded and developed the
film. Now Land had even freed the snapshooter from the camera’s manufacturer,
although the Model 95 Land camera did
not in fact “do the rest”, but left a good
deal up to its operator. The first Polaroid
camera to truly “do the rest” was the SX-70
in 1972, which Land accordingly dubbed
“absolute one-step” photography. By this
point Polaroid had already become the
second-largest photography manufacturer in
the world, and over the next decade “instant
cameras” made their way into almost half
of American homes, while the “One-Step”
(1977) became the widest selling single
camera in the world.
Polaroid photography is now on the brink
of disappearance: Polaroid Corporation
has been sold three times and filed for
bankruptcy protection twice in the past
decade, and ceased manufacturing
instant film altogether in June 2008. This
Leverhulme-funded project takes up David
Edgerton’s recent challenge to historians
of technology, normally preoccupied with
novelty and innovation, to also pay attention
to the disappearance and obsolescence
of technologies. The original instant
photography is important now, as it drifts into
extinction, precisely because it illuminates
our relation to those myriad instant imaging
technologies that it anticipated even if they
ultimately displaced it.
As a techno-cultural form, Polaroid’s
distinctiveness was in its process, which is a
combination of three key elements:
1) speed (the image appears in an instant)
2) uniqueness of the print (photography
without a negative)
3) elimination of the darkroom in the
development of the film.
This project asks what difference it makes
that a camera combines these features,
that a unique print is made immediately
and without human intervention in Polaroid
photography. What sorts of photographic
practices does this permit, encourage, or
allow for? How did Polaroid foresee the
camera being used, and what uses were
discovered that it did not foresee? Who
were the cameras aimed at, who bought
them and who used them? What aesthetic
practices and social rituals did they give
rise to? How did the photographic industry
and the photographic press receive it and
understand it? How is Polaroid photography
represented in film, literature, advertising,
and popular discourse?
To ask these questions is to ask about
the meanings of Polaroid photography.
Hence, the project follows the tradition
of the cultural history of technology. This
tradition is less concerned with who invented
a technology and how it works, than with
the different ways it has been taken up
by its users, and what it means to those
users, as well as to the designer and the
casual observer. In other words, I am not
writing a chronological history of invention
and innovation, nor an account of the
“science behind the cameras”, but rather
a discontinous cultural history of uses and
meanings. Discontinuous, because the
meanings of Polaroid technology do not
develop in a linear fashion. They change at
various junctures, but this change is uneven,
and meanings overlap with, and sometimes
contradict each other. Most importantly, they
are contested and unstable.
Among those competing over the meanings
of Polaroid photography were photo trade
magazines, photographic artists and
curators, a range of popular discourses,
and the Polaroid Corporation itself;
sometimes this struggle even took place
within the company. In sifting through these
different voices, my concern is always with
Polaroid as a public, mass amateur form,
and with those uses that had the widest
dissemination, which contributed most
to its popular meanings. This means, for
example, paying attention to its function
as a ‘party camera’ and ‘ice-breaker’, or
tracing its highly changeable cultural value –
sometimes a ‘toy’ to be disparaged, at other
times a luxurious status symbol; and noting
the way it was used for illicit purposes by
those who wanted to avoid taking pictures
to a professional developer, whether their
theme was sexual or criminal.
Dr Peter Buse
University of Salford
Peter was awarded a Research Fellowship
in 2010.
Polaroid described the OneStep as “the world’s
simplest camera’. Known as the Polaroid 1000 in
the UK, it was also the world’s highest selling from
1978-81.
Most people’s idea of a Polaroid image is the ‘integral’
Polaroid print, which was only introduced in 1972. It
develops in the light in approximately five minutes.
One of the earliest ads for the Polaroid Model 95 Land
Camera (1948). It cost $89.75 and the instant film was
‘peel-apart’.