The return of Polaroid film

Martin Waller, who writes the "City Diary" for the Times of London, informs us that there is a serious effort underway to bring back Polaroid film.

On February 8, 2008, Polaroid (by this time under the control of Thomas J Petters of Petters Group Worldwide) had announced that it would cease production and withdraw from analog instant film products completely over the course of that year. This annoyed those with either a nostalgic or an aesthetic appreciation for those products.

Although Waller's brief mention was the first I had heard of the effort to revive, with a little googling I discovered that this has been underway since January 2009 -- spearheaded by Florian Kaps (an Austrian photographer) and Andre Bosman (a former Polaroid exec.)

Personally, I have a philosophic/aesthetic reason for wishing them Godspeed.

I think that many of my own aesthetic preferences can be summed up as a desire to have the "tigers in India," as James would put it, fairly represented to me, from a distance.

I prefer live theatre to any sort of movie, digitized or filmed, in part due to the sense that what I'm seeing is unique. The actors may have spoken these words a thousand times before to each other, but will only speak them once to this precise audience.

But are the actors the "tiger," and is my preference for live theatre a preference for being in its immediate presence? Not really. If that were so, I might be more of an enthusiast for improv than I am.

The "tiger" is the script, and its author's intent. I'm necessarily at a distance from that, but I want to feel that the actors are representing that faithfully to me.

The same can be said of music. I've never been an enthusiast of jazz, because it is so thoroughly imbued with an improvisational ethos, and I want to think of the singers or instrumentalists as carrying out the intention of some (alive or perhaps long dead) composer and/or lyricist.

The same Tigers-in-India impulse carries over to the distinction between film and digital photography. Film, including the classic Polaroid products, captures a moment with a physical/chemical process that carries forward that moment to a future observer. Digital doesn't capture -- it re-creates. And the triumph of digital photography seems to me part of a general and lamentable flight from physicality.

In their own sphere, then, Kaps and Bosman are doing valuable work, and perhaps will save Antaeus from the grip of a digital Hercules who is keeping him from the refreshing influence of Gaia, of physical nature.