By the time we retrieved our pictures, a week after we’d dropped off our roll of film to be developed, we’d forgotten what we shot, and whom, and what it all looked like. We’d open the envelope of prints with recognition and surprise, seeing artifacts of our own recent past. We were looking at history.

The Polaroid changed all that. Its magical chemical innards meant the picture popped out, darkened and resolved before our eyes in minutes, collapsing time between lived moment and record of that moment. But strangely, even though the wait time was shortened, there was still a disconnect—still that searching to see what had been captured by the camera in a moment now gone forever. The Polaroid, though miraculously immediate, still recorded the irretrievable past.

The company eventually fell on hard times, ceasing production as digital photography made film irrelevant almost overnight, or so it felt. Polaroid’s unlikely revival by the Impossible Project[1] is a story of nostalgia, of the human desire for the tactile that reassuringly endures. We still want the singular, irreplaceable print that we can hold.

Ironically, the Polaroid—once defined by speed, its processing time counted in minutes—is now the slow technology. Young people who’ve never had film developed find themselves waiting for their picture, savoring the delayed gratification of re-seeing and holding what was in that moment, now history. That instant, one of millions in our lives—we are never given two of them together, but always one after another.

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[1] The Impossible Project was named for a dictum by Polaroid’s legendary founder, Edwin H. Land: “Don’t undertake a project unless it’s manifestly important and nearly impossible.”

Links:

• “How Polaroid pioneered the instant photography revolution,” by Jared Bowen, PBS NewsHour, January 21, 2020

  
  

• Edwin Land and Polaroid Photography - American Chemical Society

  
  

• The Impossible Project (Polaroid B.V.) - Wikipedia

  
  

• “Polaroid collection including photographs by Ansel Adams, other top photographers, being auctioned by Sotheby's,” by Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press, June 13, 2010

  
  

• “The Polaroid Collection auction,” by Peter Conrad, The Guardian, May 29, 2010

  
  

• “The Afterlife of Polaroid,” by Frances Richard, The Nation, June 20-27, 2016 (paywall)

  
  

• Instant Film Society, organizers of the Polacon festival

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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