Polaroid Memories Quotes

I'm a Polaroid developing in reverse

If you are lucky enough to have a childhood friend, try your hardest to grow old with them. These friends are a unique, irreplaceable breed. These friends lived through curfews and Polaroid pictures with you. These friends know your parents and siblings because they had to call your house first to speak with you. Your memories are not frozen in time on social media, but live on nonetheless. Most importantly, they remember the person you were before the world got ahold of you, so they have this crazy ability to love you no matter what. They are the living, breathing reflection of where you have been. And so, just when you think you’ve lost yourself for good, they are there to bring you face-to-face with your true self, simply by sharing a cup of coffee with them. As your world grows and becomes larger and more complicated than your backyard, even if you establish a life elsewhere, I hope your childhood friends remain lifelong allies, because mine have saved my life on more than one occasion.

…suddenly I wanted to go back and be in all the places I’d ever been, every street I’d walked down, every room I’d sat down in. I wanted to see it all again. I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind. . . . But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point.

I had a dream We were back to seventeen Summer nights and The Libertines Never growing up Somewhere along the lines We stopped seeing eye to eye You were staying out all night And I had enough So, I'll take with me The Polaroids and the memories But you know I'm gonna leave Behind the worst of us No, I don't wanna know Where you been or where you're going But I know I won't be home And you'll be on your own Who's gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning? Who's gonna rock you when the sun won't let you sleep? Who's waking up to drive you home when you're drunk and all alone? Who's gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning? It ain't me.

All these imperfections we wanted out of our perfect pictures, are, in fact the core of our perfect memories. All these imperfections that are, ultimately, after many cursing and resignation, life; life after all.

Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine Internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. The data just doesn’t exist. When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle. My generation was the last in America and perhaps even in world history for which this is true—the last undigitized generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

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.

Tampa is a long way from New York, but our men and women were not parochial. They have been citizens of the entire nation and were so remembered. When you read this impressive list of important people who lived among us, bear in mind that among those who live with us now are others who are just as important. We are not a bunch of has-beens or never-weres. You'll read about us in the Times. Then followed a list of eleven onetime residents whose obituaries recounted the worthy contributions they had made, including a woman who had been a noteworthy missionary in Africa; a painter whose works had been widely shown; a general with many medals; a businessman whose operations had covered a dozen states; a newspaper editor who had fought the good fights and won two Pulitzers for doing so... That led to a discussion of what criteria the Times probably used in deciding which deaths to memorialize and how much space to accord to each. The men also wanted to know why certain obituaries started on the front page and carrier over, while others did not- as, for example, Margaret Mead on front page, full page later; Edward Land full page later but no front page. Here Jimenez volunteered a suggestion: 'Dr. Mead dealt with ideas, Land only with things. His invention of the Polaroid camera was a contribution, but a limited one. Her probing into primitive societies enlightened us all.' The men concluded that an editorial board probably adjudicated placement along the lines suggested by Jimenez. p227

PACKING CHECKLIST Light, khaki, or neutral-color clothes are universally worn on safari and were first used in Africa as camouflage by the South African Boers, and then by the British Army that fought them during the South African War. Light colors also help to deflect the harsh sun and are less likely than dark colors to attract mosquitoes. Don’t wear camouflage gear. Do wear layers of clothing that you can strip off as the sun gets hotter and put back on as the sun goes down. Smartphone or tablet to check emails, send texts, and store photos (also handy as an alarm clock and flashlight), plus an adapter. If electricity will be limited, you may wish to bring a portable charger. Three cotton T-shirts Two long-sleeve cotton shirts preferably with collars Two pairs of shorts or two skirts in summer Two pairs of long pants (three pairs in winter)—trousers that zip off at the knees are worth considering Optional: sweatshirt and sweatpants, which can double as sleepwear One smart-casual dinner outfit Underwear and socks Walking shoes or sneakers Sandals/flip-flops Bathing suit and sarong to use as a cover-up Warm padded jacket and sweater/fleece in winter Windbreaker or rain poncho Camera equipment, extra batteries or charger, and memory cards; a photographer’s vest and cargo pants are great for storage Eyeglasses and/or contact lenses, plus extras Binoculars Small flashlight Personal toiletries Malaria tablets and prescription medication Sunscreen and lip balm with SPF 30 or higher Basic medication like antihistamine cream, eye drops, headache tablets, indigestion remedies, etc. Insect repellent that is at least 20% DEET and is sweat-resistant Tissues and/or premoistened wipes/hand sanitizer Warm hat, scarf, and gloves in winter Sun hat and sunglasses (Polaroid and UV-protected ones) Documents and money (cash, credit cards, etc.). A notebook/journal and pens Travel and field guide books A couple of large white plastic garbage bags Ziplock bags to keep documents dry and protect electronics from dust

And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot’s legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else’s stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.