Polaroid And Beyond
Instant photography – the film sort, that is – simply refuses to die and now even Leica is getting involved. Perhaps the attraction can be found in the reason it all got started in the first place. Paul Burrows documents the story of Polaroid and the inve
Instant print photography refuses to go away and is currently enjoying another renaissance via Fujifilm’s Instax system. It all started back in the early 1940s when American scientist Edwin Land – founder of the original Polaroid – began working on the idea of self-processing photographic materials.
Now that we’re deep into
the era of digital imaging, there’s lots of nostalgia surrounding film, including the delay between when a picture was taken and when the actual result could be viewed. Digital capture’s instant gratification has given the waiting time between exposure and processing something of a romantic association – the frisson of anticipation regarding success or failure – but in truth, we’ve always really wanted to see our images straightaway. And this is what drove the development of Polaroid ‘instant photography’.
The initial impetus came during a family’s Christmas vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1943. Born in 1909, Edwin Land was an American scientist who studied both chemistry and physics, and who, by the 1940s had already turned an inventive mind – and a talent for problem solving – into a successful company called the Polaroid Corporation.
After taking a few holiday snapshots of his three-year-old daughter, Jennifer, she asked him why she had to wait before she could see the pictures. The seed was sown and, over the next few hours, Land started devising how a self-processing photographic material could possibly work. He pretty well got the theory right then and there, but he later confessed that it took the next 30 years to solve all of the practical problems, particularly in terms of creating colour prints. Nevertheless, just three months after the first flash of inspiration, Edwin Land exposed and developed a prototype instant photograph which was subsequently transferred onto a transparent plastic sheet. Incidentally, Land is often given the title ‘Dr’, but never formally achieved this qualification – in fact, he didn’t complete any university studies – although he subsequently received many honorary degrees during his lifetime, including from Harvard, Yale and Columbia.
‘The Goo’
Experiments with instant photography had been performed before Edwin Land tackled the challenge, but the major difficulty had always been how to apply the developer to the film. Consequently, he tackled this problem first, initially devising a primitive foil pouch which would be crushed by rollers in the camera to release the developer.
He also worked on the consistency of the substance and the first trials of the concept used a simulated base made from mayonnaise and egg nog.
From earlier experience with the manufacture of a synthetic sheet polariser, Land knew that if a substance was applied to a surface in a highly viscous, jelly-like form rather than as a liquid, it was possible to obtain a very clean and even coating.
The instant processing reagent was affectionately nicknamed ‘the goo’, and was a highly complex brew of powerful chemicals, including a rapid-acting developing agent and a photographic fixer (or silver solvent). The same basic concept is still at the heart of instant print photography which, thanks to Fujifilm’s Instax system, continues to be popular… and most notably with children who still want to see their pictures immediately after taking them. In addition to the Fujifilm Instax products, a range of recreated Polaroid instant films are available via The Impossible Project, an organisation of enthusiasts who, in 2008, took over part of an old Polaroid production facility in Enschede, The Netherlands. Here they began the long and difficult task of designing selected Polaroid films from scratch as the patents were unavailable, as well as refurbishing compatible cameras and, subsequently, developing an all new camera.
After the demise of the original company in 2001 (and its successor in 2008), the Polaroid brand is currently licensed and used on a range of digital imaging products, including “digital instant” cameras which use a contemporary version of the instant print film based on ‘Zero Ink Printing Technology’ (ZINK for short). ZINK prints employ heat- sensitive colour dyes in layers and, interestingly, the technology’s development actually began at the original Polaroid Corporation in the late 1990s.
Finding Solutions
But let’s go right back to the very beginning. In 1926, as a freshman student at Harvard University, Edwin Herbert Land
began studying the nature of light polarisation and the materials that polarise light. As a child, he’d always been fascinated by light and, as young as 13, he started working on a solution to the problems caused by the glare of vehicle headlights.
With street lighting still poor or non-existent across America, dazzling headlights were the cause of many car accidents in the mid-1920s and Land set out to find a way of reducing the glare using the principles of light polarisation. He began experimenting with a material called herapathite, a crystalline substance made of iodine and quinine – discovered in the nineteenth century – which only passed light waves travelling in one plane and filtered out those travelling along any other. If two such crystals were superimposed perpendicularly to each other, all light was blocked from passing through. However, the problem with herapathite was that it wasn’t possible to grow the crystals any longer than about three millimetres which was too small to be of any use. Edwin Land’s solution illustrates his capacity for lateral thought. He worked out that a better approach was to use very much smaller crystals – in fact, several billion of them per square centimetre – and then coat them in a thin layer on to a transparent sheet. He also found that the best way to obtain an even dispersion of the sub-microscopic crystals was to suspend them in a thick jelly-like substance which was then applied to the sheet... the same principle subsequently applied to his instant film processing reagent.
This breakthrough enabled Edwin Land to make the world’s first synthetic sheet polariser, a product with a myriad of applications including windows and, of course, sunglasses. This commercial potential attracted a group of high-powered venture capitalists who provided the finance for the establishment of the Polaroid Corporation in September 1937.
The Challenge
When Land began work on an instant – the term used at the time was rapid access – photography system in late 1943, he set himself a tough set of objectives. For ease-of-use, the system had to be dry and work in a wide variety of temperatures, the film had to be sufficiently sensitive for use without supplementary light, the images had to have the same resolution and sharpness as conventionally-produced prints, the finished prints also had to be as archivally stable and, finally, the whole process had to be completed quickly enough to be a desirable alternative to conventional photography.
The project was divided into three key elements; the negative, the developing chemicals and the positive image receiver sheet. Initially, commercially-available B&W negative film was used and the really ingenious component of Land’s system was the processing pouch or pod described earlier.
Not only did the sealed pod permit ‘dry’ processing, it eliminated any oxidation and so allowed the use of more concentrated chemicals which enhanced the efficiency of the film and so gave the necessary ‘speed’.
To create the image receiver, Land again applied his experience derived from creating the polariser sheet and devised a positive emulsion employing billions of microscopic crystals which formed catalytic areas called ‘galaxies’. Dissolved and unexposed silver grains from the negative are attracted to these microcrystal galaxies which incorporate metal salts to cause a chemical reduction and give black image silver. The incredibly small size of each image ‘building block’ resulted in excellent sharpness and resolution, a good tonal range and high efficiency for a given ISO.
Instant Success
The first Polaroid Land camera, called the Model 95, went on sale on 28 November 1948 and cost as much as a good weekly wage, but this didn’t stop it selling as fast as the company could make them.
A special negative film – ironically manufactured by Kodak – was married to rolls of die-cut receiving sheets with a pod of processing reagent attached to the leading edge of each print. After an exposure was made, the positive-negative sandwich was pulled from the camera and passed through rollers which ruptured the pod and spread the ‘the goo’ between the two sheets. Sixty seconds or so later they were peeled apart to reveal a B&W print with a brownish tone which required coating with plasticiser to prevent fading.
Subsequent refinements gave neutral black and white tones, coating-free films, processing as fast as ten seconds, ISO 3000 sensitivity, negative-plus-positive materials and ‘self-contained’ peel-apart sheets. However, Edwin Land’s next major goal was instant colour photography, a challenge which involved devising a one-step process to replace the 22 steps (then) involved in processing and printing a conventional colour negative film. Again Land set some pretty ambitious objectives including a total process time of less than a minute, and the creation of a film that contained everything needed to deliver a dry, ready-to-handle colour print which didn’t need either washing or coating.
A top-secret laboratory, designated ‘SX-70’, was established to work on the ‘Polacolor’ project and it was
“As a child, Edwin Land had always been fascinated by light and, as young as 13, he started working on a solution to the problems caused by the glare of vehicle headlights.”
headed by a gifted chemist called Howie Rogers.
Initially, Land and Rogers experimented with the silver diffusion transfer (SDT) process – as used in the B&W Polaroid system – and an additive colour screen comprising extremely thin red, green and blue filter lines. This idea didn’t work with SDT technology as the screen blocked out too much light, but it was still patented (in 1946) and later formed the basis of the Polachrome instant slide system introduced in the 1980s.
Attention then turned to the colour-coupler process which is the basis of conventional colour film and involves the transfer of coloured dyes. Land and Rogers considered the idea of placing already-formed dyes in the film (a development of the old Autochrome process), but the key issue was making these dyes move in a controlled way from the negative to the receiving sheet.
Rogers came up with a method of linking each dye molecule to a molecule of developer which could be used to control the final image. This was called the dye developer process and the grains of silver in the negative have a direct one-to-one correspondence with molecules of dye; and whether or not those silver grains were exposed determines precisely whether or not the corresponding molecules of dye (solubilised by the developing agent) will transfer to the print receiver.
In Polacolor negatives the preformed dyes were transferred, upon exposure, to a receiving sheet in a carefully controlled manner to form a full colour image in about 60 seconds.
The Ultimate Goal
It took 16 years to perfect onestep colour photography, but when Polaroid launched the SX70 camera in 1972 it was truly revolutionary in both design and operation. The SX-70 was the world’s first folding reflextype camera, the first camera to incorporate a fully automatic exposure system and the first to have built-in electronic monitoring of its functions which prevented operation if something was wrong.
Additionally, it was the first instant camera to have automatic processing and print ejection rather than requiring manual extraction. Furthermore, SX-70 film was the first self-timing, daylight-developing, non-peel-apart instant photography material. It incorporated a multi-layered negative containing pre-formed imaging dyes, a sealed foiled pod containing the processing reagent, and the image-receiving layers. Because the processing ‘goo’ remained a permanent part of the print it included titanium dioxide pigment which provided a superbright white background against which the final image was viewed. The highly alkaline reagent was neutralised by polymeric acid in the film’s receiving and converted to water which evaporated to the outside of the print leaving a hard, dry and stable image.
The SX-70 camera was equally ingenious including a double-sided viewing/exposing mirror which gave a bright reflex viewfinder, but also allowed a folding design compact enough to fit into a handbag. To meet the camera’s considerable power requirements, a flat-form battery was incorporated into each film pack. Just three millimetres thick and weighing 19 grams, this battery delivered a huge amount of power – the SX-70 motor required two amperes of current at six volts – for such a small package.
With the Polaroid SX-70 system, Edwin Land achieved his ultimate goal which had always been to provide “absolute onestep photography”.The same basic principle is used in the subsequent 600-series, Spectra and Vision camera systems. In 1978 Polaroid introduced the Sonar Autofocus SX-70 which used ultrasonic sound waves to determine the subject distance and was, technically speaking, the world’s first totally automatic camera capable of delivering a sharply focused and well-exposed image. Subsequent derivatives of the folding reflex design were the SLR 680 and the SLR 690, the latter released in 1998 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Polaroid camera. Five years earlier, in 1993, Polaroid introduced an all-new system called Vision (or Captiva in some markets) which was again based on a folding reflex-type camera
“The first Polaroid Land camera, called the Model 95, went on sale on 28 November 1948 and cost as much as a good weekly wage, but this didn’t stop it selling as fast as the company could make them.”
and a self-developing colour film called Type 500. The imaging area was rectangular rather than square, a deliberate attempt to appeal to a market that was now dominated by the aspect ratio of 35mm film. The Vision cameras were quite advanced and, most notably, ejected the exposed print into a storage compartment in the camera where it developed while the user continued shooting, neatly solving the problem of what to do with multiple developing prints. The system was discontinued in 1997, but the Vision film was used in a variety of other products – including the novel PopShots disposable instant camera – until also being discontinued in 2005. All production equipment was subsequently destroyed so there was no chance for The Impossible Project to resurrect what would have likely now been a popular instant film line.
Nobody can accuse Polaroid of not trying to keep instant photography alive in the 35mm film era, and there was a steady stream of new products – many based on the Type 600 colour film which was derived from the SX-70 system – through the 1980s and 1990s designed to attract new users and re-inspire old ones.
A last-ditch effort came in 1999 with the new i-Zone system which downsized to a film format with an image area close to that of a 35mm frame and was used in a range of brightly coloured or patterned cameras.
Initially i-Zone was actually a massive success, particularly with younger buyers, and Polaroid exploited it with products such as adhesive-backed prints, but then as digital imaging took hold, the business dried up virtually overnight.
On the 50th anniversary of instant photography in 1998 Polaroid Corporation estimated that nearly 60 times every second somebody somewhere snapped a Polaroid print which represented around five million instant photos taken every day.
This was a huge business, but already the writing was on the wall and this was, in fact, actually the beginning of the end. marketing strategies remained muddled, resulting in bankruptcy being declared in December 2008. There have been quite a number of corporate manoeuvres since then, but the current owners of the Polaroid brand have carved out an interesting niche in today’s camera market, including contemporary interpretations of the instant print.
However, it’s Fujifilm – a comparative latecomer, in 1981, to instant photography in the film days – which has established a successful business on a product which owes its origins to Polaroid’s one-step self-developing colour print technology. Fujifilm’s Instax – which is available in a variety of print sizes, including a justreleased square format – created an unexpected revival in instant film photography thanks mainly to the sort of innovative and insightful marketing (plus product design) which could well have saved the original Polaroid. Instax cameras come in a dizzying variety of colours, shapes and styles, but importantly they’re also supported by a huge selection of accessories which help enhance the whole experience. Ironically, there’s an Instax model that’s sold as a Polaroid camera. Instax Mini – the most popular product range – is simply i-Zone re-imagined.
In fact, Instax has been so successful globally, it’s convinced Leica to launch its own cameras using the system and bearing the marque’s legendary red dot logo… it’s the ultimate accolade for instant photography and you’d have to think Edwin Land would have been impressed.
Polaroid continually worked to expand its instant photography range and in late 1983 there was an ambitious tilt at mainstream 35mm photography with the AutoProcess system which was derived from the earlier PolaVision instant movie film technology. B&W and colour transparency films were available and were developed using a dedicated processing pack in the hand-cranked AutoProcessor unit (a powered version came later). It was another clever idea which didn’t quite deliver in the end, but the distinctive and muted ‘look’ of the colour film became popular with fine-art photographers.