My heart is broken
Polaroid film is the newest casualty in the digital takeover and the news has made me sad. No more wonderfully skewed color or blurry, soft images to either transfer to watercolor paper or to cherish as is. Nothing, including any Photoshop manipulation, will ever replace or replicate the Polaroid flavor some of us have come to know and adore over the years.
When I heard about Polaroid being discontinued, my heart sank and broke. There’s no other way to explain it. Maybe it seems irrational to others, but to fellow photographers or artists it isn’t that odd that I feel a little like crying. Yes, I know that seems like a strong emotion over something like film, but a major form of art has suddenly died and it seems unlikely that it will be revived. (I think I’m also hormonal so there’s always that.) It’s as if they stopped producing brushes and paints except that you can always make a brush or a pigment to create the same effects. There is just no home-made way to recreate a Polaroid transfer or a Polaroid — period.
Yes, I’ve embraced digital but not to the point where I’ve shunned my love of film and the things that only film can do. There is nothing that a Photoshop action or filter can do that will ever be a Polaroid. I don’t want to use Photoshop to make something look like a transfer — it’s not. I want to make a transfer. It’s almost insulting and arrogant the way digital has assumed that it can replace every other way to photographically produce images as if it’s a superior or even comparable alternative. (Yes, I know it’s also a little odd that I’m speaking of the medium as if it’s capable of insult or arrogance but stick with me here.) Digital is only digital and nothing more. It’s like the way people think that taking a photograph, running a filter and printing it on canvas makes a photograph a painting all of a sudden — it’s not.
Anyhow, I had to say something somewhere. It would feel wrong not to. I felt like I had to put something out there in the universe and connect with someone who understands.
As much as my heart is broken, I do hope that a united voice might convince someone somewhere to reconsider or to take the baton and revive the production somewhere else. Ilford? Fuji? Are you with us? If you love Polaroid, check out savepolaroid.com and see if there’s something you can do to make your voice heard. We have to at least try.
