Paranoid Polaroid

It did not really surprise me to hear that the Polaroid company announced today, that they will stop their instant film production.
I was actually more surprised that they were still producing film, after they stopped building cameras some years ago.

Dr. Edwin Lang invented the instant, self developing film in 1947 and one year later the first Polaroid camera was presented. In the seventies Polaroid had taken the world by storm.
Nobody could resist the magic of those instant, magical pictures with the strange colours. Not only did the instant availability of a snapshot alter our perceptions of photographs as memories, it also encouraged unlimited creativity with the developing process.

Funnily enough, Polaroids were criticised for dumbing down "real" photography. The instant availabilty, missing finesse and untrue colours made them gimmicky and professional photographers deemed them as nothing but a party joke.

Maybe because Polaroid was such a pop-phenomenon, only few artists felt the need to work with the medium. David Hockney abandoned his swimming-pool boys for some kaleidoscopic, cubistic Polaroid collages. The critics didn´t like it.

Andy Warhol used them as a working tool for his portraits and movie-costume-designers used them as an invaluable help for their work.

So, now that digital cellphone photography has annihilated the Polaroid snapshot-gone-wrong-charme with the endless possibilities of photoshop beautification, we instantly get nostalgic for the lost analogue imperfection.

Enter POLANOID. A website project that is dedicated to collect and display the biggest online Polaroid-picture collection. It´s random and beautiful. Currently over 130.000 pictures are available, but the library is growing fast.

All pics are from polanoid.com. Posting inspired by Jockohomo.