Just read this excellent Wall Street Journal piece about The Impossible Project’s attempt to rebirth the Polaroid. I don’t know if that is a correct usage of the word rebirth—you can be reborn, I guess, but are you ever rebirthed? I know have the image in my haead of a vintage Polaroid camera coming out of a big gaping…uh, never mind. I’ll leave that image in my mind, or perhaps in the hands of people with better Photoshop skills than I. Anyway, in the article, Eric Felten writes:
Modern high-tech goods aren’t like the buggy-whip, that icon of superannuated technologies on the receiving end of creative destruction. We could go centuries without a single buggy-whip being made; but if there were a new fad for buggies, it wouldn’t take much in the way of reverse-engineering to figure out how to recreate the old leather horse prod. But many 20th-century products have been made through such elaborate and arcane manufacturing processes that, if the custom machinery and proprietary knowledge for working them are lost, there is no getting them back.
Sing it man! He continues:
There are plenty of vintage technologies that have their followings and can survive as niche products. Yet this will work only if they can ratchet down from a mass-market footing to the small scale of serving enthusiasts, and do it fast enough to prevent the knowledge and equipment for making the endangered product from being lost. There may be more such challenges ahead than we’ve imagined. Come the day when all new cars are electric and service stations have replaced their pumps with power sockets, where will the proud owner of a ‘64 Austin-Healey get any gasoline to keep his roadster on the road?
Poor Austin-Healey owner! Boohoo! Just kidding. My Austin-Healey works quite well as long as it maintains a gluten-free diet. Go on and read the rest of the article here. If you’re a Polaroid person, head over to the TheImpossibleProject’s site where $21 will buy you eight opportunities to capture the world in newly-made sepia-toned monochrome Polaroid film.
(via twitter.com/sxseventy)
![hydeordie:
Polaroid photos by Lucas Samaras, Chuck Close and Andy Warhol
LONDON. A group led by a former US magistrate judge has launched an 11th hour campaign to prevent the auction of photographs from the Polaroid collection. Judge Sam Joyner and others are working towards filing a motion for a rehearing at the Minnesota bankruptcy court that awarded sale rights to Sotheby’s last August.
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The once-mighty Polaroid Corporation (famed for its invention of instant, negative-free photographs, but since eclipsed by digital photography) filed for bankruptcy twice in the past decade—most recently in 2008 in connection with a $3.65bn Ponzi (investment fraud) scheme at parent company Petters Group Worldwide. The Polaroid name and assets—barring the photography collection—were acquired by private equity firm Hilco Consumer Capital and liquidator Gordon Brothers Group, for $88m in 2009. The collection remained behind with the defunct Polaroid Corporation, renamed PBE, and is in the hands of PBE’s liquidators.
more here…
See also: More than a set of prints…](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kz13v6QdcB1qz849zo1_500.jpg)
