Gentlemen Prefer Polaroids

I've lamented Polaroid's demise for a long time now, but it wasn't until today that I learned that the final destruction of the company that brought millions so much instant fun was brought about by a Ponzi scheme. Sure, the digital age had a hand in it, but I always felt that there was enough interest in the film to keep it around. But read this from the New York Times:

The company that Mr. Land started in 1937 became a victim of the digital age, going bust first in 2001 and again in 2008. The second time, after it was bought by Petters Group Worldwide, Polaroid was caught up in a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme run by the company’s founder, a Minnesota businessman named Tom Petters, who was convicted in December of fraud and money laundering, among other charges.

Today, however, there is another tragedy brought about by Petters. Bankruptcy court in Minnesota has ordered Polaroid to sell off part of its Permanent Collection in order to pay back some of its creditors. The auction by Sotheby's is expected to earn between seven and eleven million dollars. Nobody but the court, it seems, thinks the sell-off worth it.

One of the artists whose work is to be sold is Ansel Adams. Adams is best known for his careful photographs of the Yosemite Valley and other western landscapes. He is also known for his technical skills in making "perfect" prints. He is the co-inventor of the Zone System of exposure and author of a series of books on the process of film photography. So it may surprise some that Adams was fervent in his admiration of the Polaroid films, excitedly calling them the future of photography.

The future is behind us now. The Impossible project is widely touted for trying to bring back the Polaroid experience, but they are having trouble developing their own films. Make no mistake, what they are doing is something new. They will not be making Polaroid. Fuji makes instant films that work, so the idea of The Impossible Project sometimes gets by me. But I will wait and see.

But we have digital cameras now that can make images that we never had dreamed of before. And they are instant. Sort of. It sometimes takes me weeks to process all the images I capture in a single day, tweaking them in Photoshop to make them sing. And there is always something new to learn. Still, I miss the film. Oh, there are many more images made now that people would not have been able to take to the drug store for processing, but instant film did that too, and I am still goofy about the old line: "Gentlemen Prefer Polaroids."