Polaroid Instant Film
American · Polaroid / Instant Film 1948–present
A camera that contains its own darkroom. The idea came from Edwin Land's three-year-old daughter asking, in 1943, why she could not see the picture immediately, and he had a working process within four years.
Origin
Land demonstrated instant photography in 1947 and Polaroid sold the first camera in 1948. Black-and-white instant film came first, colour in 1963 with Polacolor, and the fully integrated SX-70 system in 1972 — a single sheet that develops in the light, in your hand, with no peeling and no waste. Polaroid became a major corporation, collapsed in 2001 as digital arrived, and the film was revived by the Impossible Project, which bought the last factory and spent years reverse-engineering a chemistry whose recipes had been lost.
Technique
Every stage of the photographic process is packed into a sheet a few millimetres thick. Negative layers, a receiving layer and a pod of viscous reagent are laid together; when the picture is ejected, rollers burst the pod and spread the reagent evenly between the layers, which develops the negative and simultaneously transfers the dyes to the receiving sheet. In the integral SX-70 system a layer of opacifier protects the developing image from light and then turns transparent as the chemistry completes, which is why the picture appears to fade in rather than out.
The palette
Soft, warm and slightly unstable, with a limited dynamic range and a characteristic tendency toward cyan or magenta shifts depending on temperature during development. Colours are less accurate than any conventional film — highlights blow easily, shadows block up, and the whole image sits in a compressed tonal band. Cold weather development turns the image blue, heat pushes it warm, and this variability is now valued rather than corrected.
Legacy
Instant photography changed the social use of the medium before digital did the same thing again: an image with no negative, no lab and no delay, which made it the format of choice for both intimacy and evidence. Warhol, Mapplethorpe and Hockney used it seriously, and its unrepeatable, object-like nature is precisely what has kept it alive through two extinctions.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.