Polaroids

Polaroids come in many sizes and grades, but often they can be called snapshots in the strict sense (if we consider a sufficiently low-grade Polaroid camera a “snapshot camera”) or in the looser sense (if they are small). Polaroids constitute an exception to so many generalizations about snapshots that they deserve separate discussion. In our era nonprofessional photographic equipment has been moving ever closer to professional equipment, and photo labs have almost vanished. One consequence of this is that the formal distinctions between snapshots on the one hand and amateur and professional photography on the other are blurring. The earliest example of this convergence is the instant camera. The most important instant camera by far is the Polaroid camera, the first version of which appeared in 1948. The “production values” of Polaroid photography at the lower grades could be significantly better than those of classical snapshot photography. Its specific technical qualities, together with the overwhelming fact that the results are immediate, have appealed to art photographers from Walker Evans and André Kertész to Lucas Samaras and Juergen Teller, as well as to experimenters at all levels of professionalism. (Because of its palette, the SX-70, the first Polaroid camera to produce integral color prints, has been especially popular since its introduction and retains a cult following today even though the film is no longer available.) And in a sense Polaroids are controllable. Because the prints are “instant,” you can see the results and keep trying—so Polaroids tend to be created in batches (of which the most perfect may be the one that survives). Thus we finders may often feel we can divine the snapshooter’s intention a little bit better than we can in the usual case. In sum, an ordinary “consumer market” Polaroid print can seem to be just what an artist intended. Is my first example some sort of artistic effort? I can’t be sure, but I’m more inclined to say so than I normally ever am with snapshots. The very fast turnover favors one kind of meta-shit: it means that Polaroids can be seen in Polaroids much more often than snapshots can be seen in snapshots generally. That is, the Polaroids taken earlier in a session naturally tend to show up in the ones taken later. Again, since Polaroids weren’t developed in a lab, people had a feeling of privacy; what I’ve been calling snapshot intimacy is often jacked up several notches. Snapshooters and subjects assumed that only they would see their photos and were encouraged to play with taboos. Nudity and sex are common in Polaroids. Finally, Polaroids are significantly more object-like than ordinary snapshots. Their absolute uniqueness, together with their physical properties—their thickness and heaviness, their rounded, closed edges, their utterly standard dimensions, and the stronger framing effect of their borders—work to give them greater integrity as objects.

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