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I watched a documentary called Time Zero about the end of Polaroid film. I can't really recommend the doc itself--it's got a lot of filler--but it tells an interesting story. I, like everyone my age, have some Polaroids of myself. But I never really liked them. I didn't like the colors, and I didn't like that you only got the one image. But I know, and this doc illustrates, that there are a lot of devoted followers of Polaroid. A lot of artists use it exclusively, because it is its own medium. No other type of photography is quite the same as Polaroid. But that means that all those devotees are dependent on one company for their art, and the company cut them off.
They do a lot of interviews with the artists, where they talk about evil corporate greed and how Polaroid doesn't respect its heritage and doesn't understand that it has devoted customers, and that's why they ceased production. Then they interviewed a VP of Sales at Polaroid, and--that's not it at all.
Polaroid film is incredibly complicated. The negative has 17 layers of chemicals laid down on it. It uses a lot of different chemicals, many of which are manufactured exclusively for Polaroid, and some of which are mined specifically for Polaroid.
Even as sales of the film fell, it was always profitable for Polaroid. They would have kept manufacturing it forever. But it wasn't profitable for their suppliers.
In 2005, several suppliers contacted them and said they were discontinuing production of the chemicals Polaroid needed. So Polaroid bought up everything they could, and set about manufacturing the last batch of film. As it went through each production stage, they dismantled those factories. 2008 wasn't when they made the decision to stop making the film, it's when they ran out of film to sell. So all those conspiracy theories--it was just that the world changed, and they couldn't keep it going.
The documentary also talks about the Impossible Project, which is, frankly, nuts.
An entrepreneur bought a Polaroid factory in the Netherlands, hired 13 laid-off Polaroid employees, and set about trying to manufacture film for Polaroid cameras. It wasn't a matter of just turning the machines back on, though. Polaroid had a global manufacturing supply chain--different parts of the film were made in different places. And, like Polaroid, the Impossible Project, couldn't get the chemicals that Polaroid had used. So what they did, and why it was called the Impossible Project, was reinvent instant film.
Polaroid's instant, integrated, color film cost $1 billion to develop in 1972. There's a reason they had a natural monopoly in instant photography. No one else had the money to sink into coming up with a rival product. And the Impossible Project was trying to make one in a year, with 13 people in a factory that used to employ 400, in a world where many of the chemicals originally used were restricted or banned, and to meet the needs of preexisting cameras. They said the only advantage they had was they knew that instant film was possible.
The crazy thing is that they succeeded. You can buy their film for your Polaroid camera right now. I'd heard about this before, vaguely, but I had thought that Polaroid had decided making film was no longer profitable and this entrepreneur had just picked up the manufacturing and kept it going. I had no idea what an audacious accomplishment it was.
The whole story, though, really made me think about how integrated the world is. Polaroid, as a company, didn't exist on an island making its film, it was dependent on a whole collection of suppliers upstream. As conditions changed, what Polaroid--and its customers--wanted didn't matter. The water had stopped flowing and they couldn't turn it back on again.
The difficulty of the Impossible Project, whose film is not and will never be quite the same of the original, points out that trying to preserve something from the past requires sometimes monumental effort, and re-engineering it to fit the world of the present.
I sometimes think about how, if I were sent back in time right now, almost none of the amazing technological advances I have with me would even function. Nothing that required electricity, the internet, wireless or cellular signals, fuel--probably the most astounding thing would be the fabric of my clothes. All of the advances we live with are not just matters of knowledge we have gained or innovations, they are dependent on the entire web of our economy to keep going. Which is why we, all of us, will see many more technologies like Polaroid vanish in our lifetimes as the global economy changes and doesn't support them any longer.
You know, I never liked Polaroid, but I kind of want to go out and have my picture taken on a Polaroid just for old time's sake.
They do a lot of interviews with the artists, where they talk about evil corporate greed and how Polaroid doesn't respect its heritage and doesn't understand that it has devoted customers, and that's why they ceased production. Then they interviewed a VP of Sales at Polaroid, and--that's not it at all.
Polaroid film is incredibly complicated. The negative has 17 layers of chemicals laid down on it. It uses a lot of different chemicals, many of which are manufactured exclusively for Polaroid, and some of which are mined specifically for Polaroid.
Even as sales of the film fell, it was always profitable for Polaroid. They would have kept manufacturing it forever. But it wasn't profitable for their suppliers.
In 2005, several suppliers contacted them and said they were discontinuing production of the chemicals Polaroid needed. So Polaroid bought up everything they could, and set about manufacturing the last batch of film. As it went through each production stage, they dismantled those factories. 2008 wasn't when they made the decision to stop making the film, it's when they ran out of film to sell. So all those conspiracy theories--it was just that the world changed, and they couldn't keep it going.
The documentary also talks about the Impossible Project, which is, frankly, nuts.
An entrepreneur bought a Polaroid factory in the Netherlands, hired 13 laid-off Polaroid employees, and set about trying to manufacture film for Polaroid cameras. It wasn't a matter of just turning the machines back on, though. Polaroid had a global manufacturing supply chain--different parts of the film were made in different places. And, like Polaroid, the Impossible Project, couldn't get the chemicals that Polaroid had used. So what they did, and why it was called the Impossible Project, was reinvent instant film.
Polaroid's instant, integrated, color film cost $1 billion to develop in 1972. There's a reason they had a natural monopoly in instant photography. No one else had the money to sink into coming up with a rival product. And the Impossible Project was trying to make one in a year, with 13 people in a factory that used to employ 400, in a world where many of the chemicals originally used were restricted or banned, and to meet the needs of preexisting cameras. They said the only advantage they had was they knew that instant film was possible.
The crazy thing is that they succeeded. You can buy their film for your Polaroid camera right now. I'd heard about this before, vaguely, but I had thought that Polaroid had decided making film was no longer profitable and this entrepreneur had just picked up the manufacturing and kept it going. I had no idea what an audacious accomplishment it was.
The whole story, though, really made me think about how integrated the world is. Polaroid, as a company, didn't exist on an island making its film, it was dependent on a whole collection of suppliers upstream. As conditions changed, what Polaroid--and its customers--wanted didn't matter. The water had stopped flowing and they couldn't turn it back on again.
The difficulty of the Impossible Project, whose film is not and will never be quite the same of the original, points out that trying to preserve something from the past requires sometimes monumental effort, and re-engineering it to fit the world of the present.
I sometimes think about how, if I were sent back in time right now, almost none of the amazing technological advances I have with me would even function. Nothing that required electricity, the internet, wireless or cellular signals, fuel--probably the most astounding thing would be the fabric of my clothes. All of the advances we live with are not just matters of knowledge we have gained or innovations, they are dependent on the entire web of our economy to keep going. Which is why we, all of us, will see many more technologies like Polaroid vanish in our lifetimes as the global economy changes and doesn't support them any longer.
You know, I never liked Polaroid, but I kind of want to go out and have my picture taken on a Polaroid just for old time's sake.