The Polaroid Restoration

A couple months back, amid the usual landslide of new photos appearing daily on my Facebook wall, something unusual popped up. It was a dim interior shot of some sort of public building. It was blurry, the colors were characteristic of the muddy palette we associate with family snapshots from the 70s and 80s. I presumed someone had scanned an old print, but no! The shortest investigation revealed that this shot was taken mere minutes ago with a smartphone “Polaroid app.”

Certainly, I’ve been the first to bemoan the death of film for a host of reasons. As the wide availability of excellent, high-tech and, let’s face it, idiot-proof cameras has become a fact of life, so have I met lots and lots and lots of people superglued to their cameras, apparently hellbent on documenting every house party, indie band and PBR-drenched cookout with the practiced eye of the auteur. While this phenomenon has been occasionally annoying, I don’t begrudge it. Everybody needs a hobby.

And for this reason, I’m a little befuddled by the nostalgia for Polaroids. As far as I can remember, the only selling point for those things in old days was that you could see your pictures more-or-less instantly. From a picture-quality perspective and from a price perspective (about a buck-a-print, according to a quick Google) they had almost nothing to recommend them. Sure, the kids that had them in my elementary school days were cool, but that was only because they were a signal of affluence. When I went on field trips, I took a 110 point-and-shoot (which was, in retrospect, a very good move on my parent’s part). In other words, if any part of the film market was destined to have its lunch eaten by digitals, Polaroids were it.

But of course, it is just nostalgia. We like our old pictures because they look old, they look like memories. When we think about our childhoods, we see them in that patina. What's more, when we think about our parents in the time before us, that's how we see them. We're reaching for that. It's really a film thing, but Polaroids were anointed because, well, they provide instant gratification (which is why people are actually buying Polaroid cameras again, or digging out old ones and buying film at exorbitant prices), and the way they barf out the picture is cool.

There's not a great point here. This is all just another manifestation of our societal search for authenticity, we talk about it all the time. But creating an app for a smartphone, the singular instrument of our uber-connected modern world, that duplicates the look of the dead technology that it helped kill strikes me as just deliciously ironic.