Polaroid Instant Quotes

As late as 2003, the hip-hop star Andre 3000 could sing “Shake it like a Polaroid picture,” in Outkast’s megahit “Hey Ya,” and even young people did not have to ask what he meant.1

Another time, when a shareholder questioned how much he was spending on product development, he was even more dismissive: “The bottom line,” he said, “is in heaven.” Romantic utopianism lay at the very core of what was soon to be a billion-dollar business.

It was to be called Polasound, and the idea was truly eccentric: to attach an audio caption to each Polaroid integral picture. The idea seems to have been that you’d clip your picture into a little plastic carrier that held a strip of audiotape. For recording and playback, you’d pop each one into what looked like a small radio with a slot on top. The gizmo never got past the drawing board, but it’s one of the most bewitchingly weird notions Polaroid ever considered.

OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability. * In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not identical * Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively unnoticed. to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.7 A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years. In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry.

SOMETIMES I THINK I remember the pomegranate. Its tannic sweetness, the sticky juice running down my chin. But to this day there is an instant Polaroid of the moment taped to our refrigerator in Bay Ridge and again I cannot be certain whether if there were no photograph there would be no memory.

Vivimos una vida Polaroid, queremos todo al instante, y con esa inmediatez vemos la oración.

Pop was to be popular music. Contemporary. Like Andy Warhol’s take on news events and celebrity. The big questions right next to the little ones. Our attempt to make the instant eternal. A series of Polaroids of this moment. To keep forever.

Jim Collins writes: ‘Gillette didn’t pioneer the safety razor, Star did. Polaroid didn’t pioneer the instant camera, Dubroni did. Microsoft didn’t pioneer the personal computer spreadsheet, VisiCorp did. Amazon didn’t pioneer online bookselling and AOL didn’t pioneer online internet service.’17 What

A child’s why led to the development of the Polaroid camera. On a family vacation in the 1940s, Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t immediately see the photograph her father had just taken. Land knew that producing an instant photograph was impossible: You had to develop film in a darkroom. But instead of relying on what he knew, he continued to think about her question. Four years later, his first black-and-white instant camera hit the market.

These findings map directly onto the rise and fall of Polaroid. After Land invented the instant camera in 1948, the company took off, its revenues jumping from under $7 million in 1950 to nearly $100 million in 1960 and $950 million by 1976. Throughout that period, the photography industry remained stable: Customers loved high-quality cameras that printed instant pictures. But as the digital revolution began, the market became volatile, and Polaroid’s once-dominant culture was left in the dust.

In the 1970s, photographers were shooting a billion Polaroid photographs each year.

Eastman Kodak went from its late-1980s peak of 145,000 employees to fewer than 20,000, and filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2012. Polaroid, already struggling with longstanding debt and other problems, got clobbered. Between 2001 and 2009 the company declared bankruptcy twice and was sold three times; one of those buyers went to federal prison for fraud. Polaroid film was discontinued forever in 2008.

Each had imagined a perfect new product, whole, already manufactured and sitting before him, and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible.

In 1948, the year when the Land camera appeared in late November, Polaroid took in $1.48 million. A decade later, it had grown to $89 million in sales; ten years after that, in 1969, it was nearing half a billion. Even as the press kept saying “the stock is overvalued,” it kept going up. After rising almost nonstop through the fifties, it split 4-for-1 in 1964, and split again in 1968. It became a glamour purchase, and even against the advice of some of their brokers, people kept buying shares.

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it,” he once said, “and don’t think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream.

Dr. Land’s eyes were something to be experienced,” recalls Nan Rudolph, a chemist who worked in his lab in the late 1950s. (She had been yet another of Clarence Kennedy’s Smith College students.) “When he looked at you, it was the most piercing look you’d ever seen. I think that’s what people deferred to—that analytical, intelligent, piercing gaze.

Polaroid sales grew from just under $1.5 million in 1948 to $1.4 billion in 1978. For 30 years, Polaroid dominated instant print like Pan Am dominated international travel: by delivering spectacular breakthroughs, year after year, which delighted customers. In both cases, a master P-type innovator at the top fueled those loonshots, which grew the franchise, which, in turn, fueled more loonshots. The wheel in the camera kept on turning. The dangerous virtuous cycle spun faster and faster.

Somehow, though, people still think that Polaroid pictures inevitably degrade. It may be that the instant nature of the film makes it seem ephemeral or fragile. A 1980 song by the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg contains the lines, “The Polaroids that hold us together / Will surely fade away.” They don’t have to, though. Many of the first tests, from 1944, look just fine.