A living anachronism, maybe, but certainly living. In 2008 alone, 24 million instant-film packets were sold around the globe, feeding an estimated one billion working Polaroid cameras worldwide. Bosman and Kaps sensed the truth Polaroid management had missed: Sales may have declined with the rise of digital cameras, but the antiquated film sold steadily to a cultishly devoted base that, the two men argued, more than justified the manufacturing costs. The Polaroid employee tasked with this dissolution, André Bosman, met Austrian entrepreneur Florian Kaps, founder of the fan community Polanoid and together they began The Impossible Project, an initiative to save Polaroid instant film from extinction. Undeterred, the company continued with plans to dismantle its chief instant-film plant in Enschede, Holland. In 2004, the company stopped producing the negatives needed to create its instant film, and four years later, the company’s materials supply was running dangerously short of demand. Polaroid’s brush with extinction started in 2001 when, nearing bankruptcy, the company was restructured by various investment firms known for selling off valuable assets from failed brands.Ĭuriously, the instant film didn’t count as one of those assets and was consigned to the scrap- heap. What makes us love Polaroid so hard? Is it the way that straydetails and furtive glances always seem to catch the lens’ focus, the way nothing looksaccidental? Is it theway thatthose first pale colors appear, arriving both fresh and old before deepening,tunneling backwards? Is it the shaking-pointless, by the way-to make the picturedry faster, develop more fully? The way life inside a Polaroid looks unaccountably warm and safe, in a way no one could ever reasonably expect?
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