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I’m sure most people have used a Polaroid. I have, and I like them a lot – in fact I actually own several Lomo cameras and a Holga but I never use them because it’s expensive to get them processed and there’s a very high number of misses for each hit.

I agree that posting Poladroid photos on a Polaroid site is just wrong and I wouldn’t accept them either, but please don’t sneer at these people. They’re just having fun with photos. The world moves on. Digital is here.

I inhabit a website called polanoid.net, and every day hundreds of people attempt to upload poladroids. I used to happily look through every image uploaded and find plenty of interesting things to look at…

These days I get tons of poladroided party shots whcih miss the point- and they get taken down off the site, but still- it feels like an invasion!

I am not being self righteous, in fact, but I do think that people should not ignore the real thing- take advantage of the real thing while it still exists.

This is EXACTLY the sort of pious nonsense I’m talking about. The people enjoying Hipstamatic don’t have any interest in Polaroid for many reasons. Why on earth should they show an interest in Polaroid simply because one of the ‘looks’ in Hipstamatic is Polaroid? They use the app because it’s fun and lets them make their photos look more interesting and colourful. Some of them aren’t creative photographers, some of them are.

But WHO CARES?

Polaroid is dying for many reasons. Are you going to ‘target’ all the users of PictureShow, Polardroid, SwankoLab, CameraBag, Photoshop, etc etc etc as well?

You shoot *your* stuff, that makes you happy, and let other people shoot their own stuff, that makes *them* happy.

For me, digital is only the enemy because of the threat it causes. Not in terms of a threat to what I do with my images – but instead the threat it causes to the manufacture of the film I love.

I think film film – like 35mm, etc will be around much longer than instant film, say. So I think there is a distinction to be made there too. A light sensitive film is not as hard to make as Polaroid film with over 20 component parts. So there will always be someone who takes it upon themselves to “make” film, but sadly small scale production isn’t an potion for my beloved instant film.

The other interesting thing is that Polaroid exists simply because it is fast. No Dad taking pictures on holiday would have used Polaroid if it had to go and be developed. It was distinct from film when it emerged because it was fast. It was lower quality, but the fact it was instant was its one and only selling point. Obviously Polaroid branched out into pro photo proofing, medical photography (particularly dentistry), forensics, pornography, casting, continuity… All because it was instant.

Now, digital is more instant than a Polaroid (technically- though you do still need more equipment i.e. a computer, etc to create an image). So all the reasons that Polaroid was used have slowly been eaten away. Professionals don’t use it because digital is faster and cheaper for clients, so expensive 5×4 sheet films were the first to vanish. The same things go for all of those other applications… the only people who still had the potential to keep at least a small proportion of the films alive were the average consumers, who would go to Boots to buy their 600 film. It is those people, whose quest for a different kind of instant led to a changeover to 3.2 MP Casio Exilim cameras, and iPhones. now, who buys Polaroid film? Addicts like me, and a few artists here and there. But there are not enough of us to keep it alive.

So, this is why Hipstamatic is a threat to me. I pick on the people who like Hipstamatic because they are the people who potentially, have enough of an interest in an analogue sensibility to shoot this way. Those are the people who have the potential to be converted to real Polaroid – so it seems like more of an insult when people who like what analogue looks like use the very tools that are killing it… if you see what I mean.

I like the notion of an instant photograph being an absolute one off, like a mini painting, never to be recreated as an equal original. Whereas a run of 5 single prints from one neg will be equally “original”. I guess a Polaroid is the negative, and everything that comes after is a copy.

I like the way Polaroid makes me see the world differently- it taught me to keep hold of moments, it taught me to appreciate the physical print- the print that maybe has grains of sand stuck to it from the beach that it was shot on. That Polaroid isn’t just an image of a place, it takes part of the place with it and is part of it. You can touch it. Digital, for me, prevents that closeness- a glass screen gets in the way of me holding and touching…. and that’s why it can’t be replaced for me.

The whole digital/analogue debate is totally interesting. Not only in terms of the images themselves, and the process of taking them, but also in terms of the archive – the format of what we leave behind, and how accessible it will be to future generations as technology changes. (How many of us have a floppy disk drive to extract the data we so carefully backed up a decade ago? Do we care if it is lost?) And how that will impact on our sense and understanding of history. On personal and wider political level.

But I don’t personally really see any particular hierarchy between digital and analogue. I see them simply as different mediums; preferring to use (but not necessarily to look at) analogue myself, because the whole light on photo paper thing turns me on more than creating a digital file made of 0s and 1s. But this is also because I don’t really enjoy spending more time at my computer than I have to and I do (in an old fashioned sense) enjoy the simple task of framing something that makes a beautiful or interesting picture, without having to really alter anything afterwards: my decisions are made on site at the time of taking the picture rather than later. But this is why I love my Leica, which creates such clear images, where blades of grass and lines in the sky are totally defined, that using it has actually made me see better with my own eyes.

I also like your comment, Christa, about the images you did not take. I think with film though this can happen easily, by mistake. The times my camera wasn’t winding on for whatever reason, I remember what the photos should have been in some ways more clearly than I remember those I did take. Like the landscape you described. It’s about making a conscious decision to remember. But that is not to do with digital or analogue – it’s about remembering to look and observe rather than only see through the lens of whatever photographic devise one is using..

Thanks for nice discussion!

Elly