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Overview
Polaroid was often dismissed as a toy, but Buse takes it seriously, showing how it encouraged photographic play as well as new forms of artistic practice. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of the Polaroid Corporation, Buse reveals Polaroid as photography at its most intimate, where the photographer, photograph, and subject sit in close proximity in both time and space—making Polaroid not only the perfect party camera but also the tool for frankly salacious pictures taking.
Along the way, Buse tells the story of the Polaroid Corporation and its ultimately doomed hard-copy wager against the rising tide of digital imaging technology. He explores the continuities and the differences between Polaroid and digital, reflecting on what Polaroid can tell us about how we snap photos today. Richly illustrated, The Camera Does the Rest will delight historians, art critics, analog fanatics, photographers, and all those who miss the thrill of waiting to see what develops.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226312163 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Camera Does the Rest
How Polaroid Changed Photography
By Peter Buse
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31216-3
CHAPTER 1
Just a Toy
I'm very excited about that little gadget which I thought was just a toy at first.
WALKER EVANS, 1974
According to the legend, Polaroid photography started with a childish desire. It started with Jennifer's question. Jennifer was Edwin Land's three-year-old daughter, and she put the question to her father in December 1943. Land and his family were on holiday in Santa Fe, taking a break from Polaroid's wartime work, and he and Jennifer had spent an afternoon seeing the sights and taking photos on Land's Rolleiflex. Afterwards, back at the guest house, Jennifer was impatient to see the results, and asked why she could not see the photos right away. As Land told the story, and many others repeated it afterwards, the child's impatience was a spur to invention for the father, who took up the challenge his daughter had set. He stepped back out into the late afternoon and walked around Santa Fe, thinking through each problem and obstacle, figuring out how the chemistry would work, the design and mechanics of the camera. By the end of the walk, Land said, he had more or less answered all the basic questions and had started planning the creation of one-step photography in Polaroid's labs. As luck would have it, his patent lawyer, Donald Brown, was also in town, so Land sought him out at his hotel and dictated to him the fundamentals of the system. From the question being posed, to its full solution being expressed, perhaps six hours had passed, give or take.
It is the sort of story that makes historians of technology throw their hands up in despair. A near perfect example of the "Eureka" school of invention, it comes complete with the solitary inventor, the flash of inspiration, and the solution fully formed. Stories like this are popular precisely because they leave out all the complexity and messiness of invention, which is more often gradual and collaborative and is usually marked by failures and false starts, not instantaneous breakthroughs. Land is often held up as the last of the American inventor-heroes, with this tale as the centerpiece of the legend. But even in his own telling, while he confirms the role of his daughter, he actually underplays the "lightbulb" moment. Instead, he emphasizes the three years of hard collective work that followed, as well as the conditions that existed beforehand at Polaroid to allow the discovery, particularly the competence in advanced research developed by the company through its years of work on polarizer technology, and including the work it was doing for the US military at that very moment, producing, among other things, combat goggles, sighting devices, and early heat-seeking missile technology. The Santa Fe story may be neat, but it obscures more than it reveals. If it is of interest to us now, it is not so much for the portrait of the genius inventor, but for the picture of his daughter, the first Polaroid photographer.
Jennifer Land may not have taken any pictures on that day, but in her impatience, in her reluctance to wait, she is the prototype of Polaroid photographers to come, all of them in a hurry to see the image within a minute, or minutes, of its capture. Before an invention can be conceived, a desire needs to exist, in this case a desire for a scene to yield up its double before the moment has passed or the subject departed. In more recent times this photographic desire — wanting it now — has become a more or less standard expectation. For snapshot takers, one-hour photo labs in the 1990s were just the advance guard of the digital haste that was nearly upon them. And what digital photographer would show even as much tolerance as Jennifer on that day in Santa Fe, prepared to save the question for the end of the shooting session and the return home, never mind a single hour? If you are patient, and willing to wait until chapter 3, you will find out much more about the connections between Polaroid and digital, but for now it is worth observing that this desire has not always been uniformly held. Compare Jennifer Land or the photographer operating a cellphone camera with the serene patience of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the American photographer who ventured into his darkroom only once a year to take in his harvest of images, or street photographer Garry Winogrand, who left behind at his death over 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. Meatyard and Winogrand are at the extreme end of the spectrum, but they are far from complete exceptions. The recently discovered and much celebrated Chicago amateur street photographer Vivian Maier took more than 100,000 photographs, but left many of them undeveloped, possibly because she could not afford the photofinishing. It is also easy to forget that, for some people, family or holiday snaps are a source of trepidation as much as pleasure: in the days before digital, a friend of mine so dreaded the results of her snapping that she left rolls and rolls of film undeveloped in her sock drawer.
The photographic patience of a Meatyard or Maier may not be widely valued these days, but in one sense at least it is indispensable, even unavoidable. A week or even a month after it is taken, a family snapshot does not yet contain its full charge. It needs to ripen, to ferment. It needs to be put in a shoebox, or forgotten on a hard drive, only to be chanced upon many years later. With the passage of time, the people or places or events pictured take on their retrospective weight. A loved person in a photo may have grown up, died, or moved away, a couple may have gotten together or split up, an object been lost or a building vanished. When the picture is taken, these changes may be anticipated, but they take on their photographic force only much later as an aftereffect, in the moment of contemplation. This is what Roland Barthes calls the future anterior tense ruling the photographic. In the photograph lurks a "what will have been," a meaning pregnant in the moment, but which only becomes available retroactively. It is there in a photo of a youthful Lady Diana outside her job at a preschool: she is dead, and she is going to die, as Barthes would put it. That is, it is there if we know, or imagine we know, the person pictured. This is why the snapshots of others, of people of whom you have no memory, can leave you cold: without the memory, the photograph loses its force.
When Kodak Invented Memory
Unlike Jennifer Land and the impatient multitude that followed her, most writers on photography take memorialization to be the primary function of the amateur snapshot. Whether it is Susan Sontag declaring that "All photographs are memento mori," or Roland Barthes reflecting on "what will have been," or Jo Spence constructing imaginative photo-biographies, or Annette Kuhn on family histories, or Marianne Hirsch on narrative and postmemory, or Ulrich Baer on the photography of trauma, or Geoffrey Batchen on photographic memorial objects, or Brian Dillon using snapshots as a spur to memoir, or Jay Prosser on photography and loss, there is a remarkable consensus that photography is a technology of memory. In general, it is the vicissitudes of memory that interest these writers, for whom photography is a fragile and fallible, partial and unreliable repository of the past. Rather than providing a neutral aid to family and other forms of remembrance, photographs are assumed to actively shape memories, often through exclusions and censorship: they are residues, often painful, working by delayed action. In this school of thought, even the most straightforwardly happy of family snaps is shadowed by loss, lack, and death.
Why this almost uniform insistence on the melancholic dimensions of photography? Why the emphasis on photography as a problem of memory rather than a faithful servant to it? The reasons are at least partly corrective: the melancholic consensus seeks to counteract a much more powerful commercial discourse that assures us that the photograph is indeed a reliable guarantor of memory and proof against forgetting. Marianne Hirsch, less melancholic than many, traces that optimism to the late nineteenth century, crediting Eastman Kodak above all with promoting snapshot photography to its privileged position as the main support of modern memory. Nancy Martha West, the historian of Kodak advertising, confirms this in her comprehensive survey of Kodak promotional materials between 1888 and 1932, where she reveals how the company encouraged amateur photographers to treat their memories as objects of nostalgia, and in doing so "purged domestic photography of all traces of sorrow and death." In the rosy Kodak universe, the camera records only sunny days, unified families, happy holidays, and charming trips. Photography critics, whether they have Kodak consciously in their sights or not, have consistently sought to challenge this corporate whitewash and to reinsert the traces of sorrow and death into the photographic. On the vital point, though, they are in agreement with the snapshot giant: memory and the past are the central stakes of the photograph.
There is, however, a striking complication in West's narrative. She shows that Eastman Kodak was well into its second decade in the snapshot business before it began to promote photography as an aid to memory. Between 1888 and 1900 the company focused almost exclusively on photography as a form of play, with its cameras presented as either toys or fashion accessories. In those years Kodak advertising did not emphasize memory-making, but instead made "the sheer pleasure and adventure of taking photographs [...] the main subject" of its advertisements. In this first incarnation, then, snapshot photography was a supplement or accompaniment to leisure activities, fully absorbed in those activities. In fact, even before that, the first camera manufactured by Kodak was a novelty detective camera, and not the Kodak One, as is usually assumed. George Eastman had hoped to profit from the fad for cameras disguised as various everyday objects — parcels, canes, guns, suitcases — but the detective camera failed badly on its release in 1881.
Only between 1900 and 1915 did the work of memory gradually displace play as the main function of photography in Kodak promotional material, although the element of play persisted throughout this period. For instance, the Brownie camera, Kodak's real breakthrough into a mass market in 1900, was aggressively marketed as a toy and was targeted first and foremost at child users. The small size and light weight of the Brownie helped it to be perceived as a plaything, and its bright red, yellow, and green packaging reinforced this perception. The transition of the snapshot camera from toy to tool can then be seen in ads from the later part of this period, when the Brownie starts to be presented as a kind of training device, preparing child photographers for its serious role in future adult memory-work.
West's account of this forgotten prehistory is valuable because it gives a date to the link connecting memory and snapshot photography, when that link is normally taken to be natural or obvious. Just as importantly, it offers a window onto a tradition of snapshot practices where memory is not the central preoccupation. It gives, in other words, a context and a background for the instant photography impatiently desired by Jennifer Land. Polaroid, of course, participated fully in the memory stakes, drawing in some of its advertising on the dominant model inherited from Kodak; as a major photographic company, it could hardly be expected not to cover all the bases. A Polaroid, like any photographic image, has a complex and vexed relation to memory and the past; but its memorializing capacities are arguably not its main attraction three minutes after it has been made.
Roland Barthes, so often the first port of call in such matters, puts his finger on this problem in Camera Lucida, even if he mentions Polaroid photography only to dismiss it. "I am not a photographer," he writes, "not even an amateur photographer: too impatient for that: I must see right away what I have produced (Polaroid? Fun, but disappointing [Amusant, mais décevant], except when a great photographer is involved)." Barthes has the requisite impatience for Polaroid, but finds it "Amusant, mais décevant," unless a photographer more accomplished than himself is involved. In fact, the frontispiece of the original French edition of Camera Lucida reproduces an enigmatic blue-green photograph by Daniel Boudinet of a bed and a thin curtain, a photo that happens also to be a Polaroid, although in all the commentary on the meaning of this picture and its placement in the text, no one quite manages to explain why Barthes chose a Polaroid, or indeed, if it matters (could it be that a Polaroid is the chambre claire of Barthes' title, since it is a little photographic chamber open to light, rather than closed like a dark room?). Polaroid must also be disappointing for Barthes because its immediate arrival on the scene means that it is irrelevant to his book's main concern, which is memory; and of course, if it is fun, then it is the polar opposite of the melancholic spirit that guides his book. Even in this cursory dismissal, though, Barthes may have given us the key to what makes Polaroid different.
Toy Cameras
Polaroid is a small but significant part of the history of photography. What could be more self-evident? Edwin Land's invention finds its rightful place somewhere between the tintype and the digital array, with his company mining the rich seam of snapshot photography first opened up by Eastman Kodak. But this may be to assume too much. If Roland Barthes is right, and the defining feature of the technology is fun, perhaps it would make more sense to think of Polaroid as part of the history of toys. If we take as examples two of Polaroid's most successful cameras, the Swinger (1965) and the I-Zone (1999), the case is very strong to consider Polaroid as, at the very least, a point where the histories of photography and toys overlap.
At the time of its introduction in July 1965, the Polaroid Model 20 Land Camera, or Swinger, was the smallest, lightest (at 21 ounces), and cheapest ($19.95) camera that Polaroid had yet made. It had a plastic body, a single-element plastic lens, and a semiautomatic exposure system, with the word YES appearing in the viewfinder when exposure was correct. Although it did not look like one, it was in effect a box camera, like the Brownie. When in 1964 Land announced the development of this camera, he explained that it marked Polaroid's entry into the mass market of cameras "priced in the range where perhaps 70 percent of families buy." The Swinger performed even better in this market than Polaroid's most optimistic projections, not only becoming the company's highest-selling product, but catapulting the company from an 11% share of US camera sales in 1964 to a 30–35% share in 1966, and this at a time when the market for still cameras in the United States had trebled in six years. The key to this success was getting the Swinger and its film into drugstores, where it could clear far more than in photo specialty shops. In fact, Polaroid's whole publicity effort for the camera was geared away from conventional photo retailers. One of the main ambitions of the campaign was to get Type 20 film stocked in the "'general store' type of outlets frequently found at beach and ski resorts, yacht clubs and marinas, campgrounds, and similar 'non-traditional' outlets." Polaroid followed up the Swinger with the simpler Swinger Sentinel, which had no built-in flash, and the Big Swinger, which in spite of its name, was even lighter, at 17 ounces.
The size of the Swinger, its weight, its plastic body and bright red shutter release, as well as its promotion outside of conventional photography sales sites, all contributed to the camera's status as a toy. Polaroid itself encouraged this view, announcing in a brochure in 1967 that "Polaroid's in the toy business," and that the Swinger is a "juvenile status symbol." As this brochure makes clear, advertising for the Swinger was aimed primarily at teenagers and what one press release identified as "the younger set." Youth magazines were saturated with Swinger ads, with, for example, every issue of Boy's Life and American Girl containing one during 1967. For television, a young Ali McGraw cavorted with friends on a beach to a jaunty jingle sung by Barry Manilow. This and other Swinger ads were shown on programs such as Batman, Daniel Boone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 12 O'Clock High, Lost in Space, The Flintstones, and Hullabaloo, clearly with a youthful audience in mind. Polaroid also produced the "Swinger Fun Book," a comic full of suggestions on ways to use the camera, and in a tactic reminiscent of Kodak's packaging of the Brownie, used bold blue, green, and purple colors for its Swinger boxes, and encouraged retailers to construct displays that made the boxes look like children's building blocks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Camera Does the Rest by Peter Buse. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Just a Toy
2. Intimate, One of a Kind
3. Polaroid and Digital
4. Polaroid Attractions
5. Polaroid Values
6. Just for Snapshots?
Conclusion
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index