.jpg "Photography Degree Zero: Cultural History of the Polaroid Image (2007)")
Photography Degree Zero: Cultural History of the Polaroid Image
By: Peter Buse, New Formations, September 22, 2007
In contemporary writing on photography, there is probably no text whose value and importance is as taken for granted as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. So great is its reach and influence that it is cited approvingly both in popular non-academic books on photography and in the densest of critical works, as well as enjoying a privileged position in writing on mourning and memory, where the author’s grief over his mother’s death has found many admirers and imitators. It is slightly odd to find Barthes, the scourge of all doxa, so universally appreciated. It is also easy to forget that this was by no means always the case. Although it made a full recovery, Camera Lucida was initially greeted by a flurry of detractors from a politicised segment of AngloAmerican photography theorists who excoriated the book for its ontological essentialism, or lamented its sentimentality and apparent humanist deviation. (1) Indeed, the force of the reaction it originally elicited gives a good sense of the challenge that it posed to thinking on the photographic. Once a necessary shock to the orthodoxies of semiotic or historicist analysis of photography, it has now become so orthodox that its inclusion, extracted, in anthologies, is inevitable, and it is even considered hors categorie, as, for instance, in The Photography Reader, where it takes pride of place as the inaugurating piece, out of chronological order. (2)
Without returning to the polemics of the early detractors, or denying the immense force of Camera Lucida, it might be worth asking whether its canonical status is not in fact symptomatic of an impasse within a certain version of photography criticism found in cultural studies. Do we really need another contribution to the melancholic consensus that so dominates the analysis of photography, or another article that notes the absence or presence of the supposed studium or punctum in this photograph or that? Slavish fidelity to Barthes’ great last book ultimately cuts off a number of potentially fruitful paths of investigation. For instance, near the start of Camera Lucida, Barthes expresses a devastating general dissatisfaction with books on photography, which he says always seem to miss their object: ‘Some are technical; in order to “see” the photographic signifier, they are obliged to focus at very close range. Others are historical or sociological; in order to observe the total phenomenon of the Photograph, these are obliged to focus at great distance’. (3) Free from the burden of footnotes, Barthes does not give examples of the sort of texts he means, but it would not be difficult to provide a few on his behalf. At one end of the spectrum of writings on photography, then, we might imagine an account of the improvements in shutter technology from 1955 to 1965 or Ansel Adams outlining the Zone system; at the other perhaps books like Gisele Freund’s Photography and Society (1974) or Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle Brow Art (1965), or even Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977). Neither approach is able to consider the Photograph in itself, which is what concerns Barthes. And yet, is the choice we are faced with when analysing photography really so starkly either/or? What if these two supposedly opposed poles were in fact taken together? Could it not be asked in what ways changes at the ‘close range’ of the ‘technical’ are implicated in the ‘great distance’ of the ‘historical and sociological’? That is, what is the cultural significance of technological change in the process of image-making and to what extent do ‘media determine our situation’ (4) or vice-versa? It is these kinds of questions that animate virtually all the work of Barthes’ compatriot Paul Virilio, as well as the German techno-materialist Friedrich Kittler, but perhaps the finest exemplar of this sort of inquiry applied to photography is Walter Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography’, where developments in photographic technology are understood dialectically in relation to the social and cultural field. (5) It is precisely this sort of simultaneous consideration of the technical and the cultural that is necessary to begin to make meaning of a piece of twentieth-century photographic history–Polaroid–that was at once technological process, social practice, and corporate institution.
POLAROID
In 1947 its arrival was greeted with all the hyperbole expected to accompany technological innovation. Shortly after Edwin Land publicly demonstrated for the first time the Polaroid ‘one-step’ photographic method to the American Optical Society, the popular photography magazines of the era breathlessly provided free publicity for a process that eventually became available as a consumer product in 1948.
The Camera called it ‘A spectacular discovery which marks a great advance in the photographic process’, while Minicam Photography anticipated that ‘it will render many pages of instruction in photographic handbooks as obsolete as tin-types’. (6) For U.S. Camera, ‘Not since the close of the last century when George Eastman first promised popular-priced cameras, daylight-loading film and a processing service has any photographic development caused such a stir’ and the usually sedate American Photography hailed a ‘revolutionary process’, as well as offering a prescient prediction on the collective image-making practice the camera encouraged: ‘One can easily foresee a festive group on a picnic or some other joyous occasion producing dozens of snapshots’. (7) The invention survived the rapture: in the revised edition of his standard and canonical History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall, writing in 1982, gives his official endorsement to the excited early reactions, calling ‘the invention by Edwin H. Land in 1947 of the Polaroid-Land process’ ‘the most innovative contribution’ to photographic technology in the post-World War II epoch. (8) Newhall, at various points curator at MOMA and at George Eastman House, wrote from a position of considerable institutional authority, and was in a position to know, having acted as a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation in the 1950s. Subsequently, however, Newhall’s pronouncement, and the technology that it garlands, begin to look somewhat parochial. Indisputably since 1982 and surely since WWII as well, the most profound development in the production of photographic images is the shift from chemistry to electronics, a change which has led to a frenzy of cultural commentary which shows no signs of abating. And yet, one of the most salient features of the digital image is the speed of its production and potential transmission, a feature that had been anticipated almost half a century earlier by the Polaroid-Land process. The advent of the digital, we are regularly told, has repercussions through all strata of culture, and it correspondingly agitates the analysts of culture. In contrast, the original instant photography, the chemical process patented by Land, has never detained for long either the great or the minor theorists of visual and popular culture. Jean Baudrillard has a few sharp remarks about it, which I will come to in due course, but apart from a possible intervention by Lacan early on, critical observations on the technology are hard to come by. There are a couple of exceptions, and although they are brief, they are not without interest.
From Camera Lucida, here is Roland Barthes’ contribution to our understanding of the technology:
I am not a photographer, not even an amateur photographer: too
impatient for that: I must see right away what I have produced
(Polaroid? Fun, but disappointing [Amusant, mais decevant], except
when a great photographer is involved). (9)
Even if we accept that the critical mode of Barthes’s last book is an acutely self-conscious subjectivism, there is still not much that can be done with ‘Fun, but disappointing’ if we want to build a theory of the Polaroid. In fact, the punctuation may disclose as much as the content of the sentence. Barthes’s remarks on a mode which would appear to provide a perfect solution for his supposed impatience, providing him with an image ‘right away’, are made in brackets. Although there are no hard and fast rules about the use of these particular graphic marks, more than one undergraduate has fallen foul of a marker’s visceral antipathy for them, as they are taken as a sign of prevarication and an inability to construct a properly developing argument. However, there is a case to be made for their dialectical power in mature hands, and it could be argued that this is the way that Barthes uses them here, to present a counter argument, within, as it were, the same breath. What is more, writers who make frequent use of brackets (as long as they are not undergraduates) can give the impression of a surplus of thought, of a thought that keeps running ahead of itself and all the time promising more. At the same time, it might be argued that bracketing (to allude to its meaning in phenomenology) is a way of containing heterogeneous elements that will not or cannot be assimilated into the main thesis: the parenthesis as a way of admitting dissonant material, but limiting the impact of that material to the space marked out by the brackets.
It would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the bracketing of the Polaroid in Camera Lucida. It is, after all, a book in which there is hardly a page without three or four sets of brackets, where the parenthetical constantly breaks into the ‘main’ text. It is worth mentioning, though, because the second example of a key contemporary thinker reflecting on the Polaroid also comes in brackets. In ‘Narrative Space’, perhaps the central essay of Screen theory in the 1970s, Stephen Heath argues against the equation of eye with camera and the supposed resulting mastery of the spectator in the visual field:
In fact, of course, any modern scientific description of the eye
will go on to indicate the limits of the comparison. Our eye is
never seized by some static spectacle, is never some motionless
recorder; not only is our vision anyway binocular, but one eye
alone sees in time … In a real sense, the ideological force of
the photograph has been to ‘ignore’ this in its presentation as a
coherent image of vision, an image that then carries over into a
suggestion of the world as a kind of sum total of possible
photographs, a spectacle to be recorded in its essence in an
instantaneous objectification for the eye (it would be worth
considering the ideological determinations and resonances of the
development and commercialization of polaroid photography); a
world, that is, conceived outside process and practice, empirical
scene of the confirmed and central master spectator, serenely
‘present’ in tranquil rectilinearity. (10)
Here again the bracket is a kind of excess: it acts as the sign of a thought which is never in danger of running out, which always has something in reserve, which can supplement its main thrust with additional detours. But one of the advantages of the parenthetical detour is that you do not really have to explore it. The bracket allows the writer to raise something and drop it at the same time. ['(Polaroid? ...)': Barthes introduces it as an interrogation mark, but the terminal bracket ends the question as abruptly as it was opened.] Meanwhile, Heath’s bracketed ‘it would be worth considering … polaroid photography’, is a kind of fly-swatting, and needs only ‘but not here’ as an appendage and we could do without the brackets entirely, for that is what he is making clear: that its ‘worth’ is not great enough to slow him down or to merit even its own sentence. And yet, just as the Polaroid for Barthes is in fact far from incidental, promising as it does the instant gratification he claims to crave when he makes anything himself, so the Polaroid goes straight to the heart of Heath’s argument, since he is critiquing the illusion of presence in vision, and the very possibility of ‘instantaneous objectification’, which the apparent immediacy of the Polaroid comes closest to achieving.
Why do Barthes and Heath simultaneously open up and push aside the question of the Polaroid in this way? Why is instant photography bracketed in these wider discussions of photography and cinema? The answer, I think, is connected to questions of cultural value. At the time that Heath and Barthes were writing (1976 and 1980 respectively), the Polaroid camera had become the widest-selling camera in history, with a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (11) And by 1983, according to Richard Chalfen, 46.3 per cent of American households contained a self-developing camera. (12) To be more precise, it was a recently launched variant of the Polaroid-Land system that had so successfully captured the amateur photography market in this epoch–what might be called the ‘second generation’ of Polaroid cameras. The in-camera film processing system, dubbed by its inventor Edwin Land, with the scientist’s predilection for accuracy, ‘one-step’ rather than ‘instant’, had been in existence for twenty-five years, but it is the SX-70 of 1972-73, particularly in its cheaper versions, of which there have been many, which determines most people’s idea of a Polaroid camera. The SX-70 was the first Polaroid camera to produce integral prints, rather than the peel-apart system of the past; it also mechanically ejected the print, whereas formerly the photographer had to pull the print manually from the camera. With an unpeopled chemical laboratory hidden inside the equipment, all that was now required was an eye and a finger; apart from that, human intervention had been eliminated. For this reason, Land named the new process ‘absolute one-step’ photography. (13) When Barthes and Heath write somewhat ambivalently of the Polaroid, it is almost certainly this newer, and extraordinarily popular, edition that they have in mind.
There is no evidence that Heath and Barthes are ambivalent about the Polaroid specifically because of its mass production and distribution. It would probably be more accurate to say that they find it too easy. Barthes says that he is too impatient to be a photographer, that he is too eager for a quick fix, but we should be suspicious about Barthes’ supposed impatience; after all, he finds disappointing the Polaroid, which does give him the image immediately. It is hard not to conclude that this professed impatience is in fact disingenuous. From Barthes earlier text, A Lover’s Discourse (1977), we know that what desire wants is not satisfaction, but more desire. Barthes may protest that he wants immediate gratification from image-production, but this isn’t really true, or possible. What he wants is to want immediate gratification but not to get it, to be always frustrated in his desire for immediate gratification, to have that gratification put off, agonizingly delayed, held up by the gap that is the non-coincidence of the event and its image. This is because, in the Lacanian terms in which Barthes is heavily steeped at this point, once you get what it is you’re after, have it in your hand, precisely at this point, as Lacan puts it in Seminar 11, it dissolves into shit. (14) The Polaroid image just gets you into that situation faster, although Barthes doesn’t exactly put it like this.
In Heath’s case, the bracketing of the Polaroid is a way of saying that its ‘ideological determinations’ are in fact not ‘worth considering’, simply because they are all too obvious–it would be just another pea for him to shell. The analysis of the Polaroid that Heath might carry out is already implicit in the longer sentence in which the parenthesis appears. It is not too difficult to extrapolate, filling in the blanks in Heath’s argument. The theoretical framework that is guiding him here is clearly Lacan’s mirror-stage, with photography providing an imaginary coherence and stability to what is a heterogeneous and disarticulated visual field. Photography, then, is analogous to the mirror in the way that it provides for the ego an illusion of unity in the face of what Lacan calls in Seminar 2 the ‘uncoordinated, incoherent diversity of the primitive fragmentation’. (15) Contrary to Heath’s suggestion, however, a photograph is not a mirror, and one of the differences between the mirror and the photograph is the speed with which the image returns. As Lacan puts it in the ‘Mirror-stage’ essay itself, the mirror provides ‘an instantaneous view of the image (l’aspect instantane de l’image)’, which is not the case for photography. (16) Instantaneity in Lacan’s model is crucial to the provision of narcissistic satisfactions and the formation of the ego in its imaginary direction. Heath makes the leap across this difference between photograph and mirror by attributing to an unidentified subject the ‘presentation’ and ‘suggestion’ of the photograph and by association the ‘world’ as a series of ‘coherent’ and ‘instantaneous’ objectifications ‘for the eye’ (the syntax is murky and it is not at all clear who precisely does the ‘ignoring’, ‘presenting’ and ‘suggesting’ that Heath identifies). And here is where the Polaroid comes in. While conventional photography can only offer the ‘instantaneous’ gratifications of the mirror in a delayed or metaphorical fashion, Polaroid photography promises genuine instantaneity. It is a technological support for narcissistic illusions in its crudest form, stripped of sophistication, and therefore requiring only a parenthetical mention. The imaginary for imbeciles, in other words.
Barthes and Heath place the Polaroid in parentheses, I am suggesting, because they cannot ignore it, and yet at the same time its sheer stupidity makes it unworthy of further investigation. But there is much to be said for stupidity. The beauty of the Polaroid, especially in its post-1972 SX-70 manifestations, where automation of all aspects of picture-taking have become the norm, is that it cannot be easily co-opted for a still dominant discourse in photography criticism, which continues to take as its organizing principle the figure of the artist-photographer, whose talent and skill in image-making is depressingly often the only lesson derived from analysis. Nor is the Polaroid image well suited for exploitation by that other large group of critics focusing on memory and loss, who pillage and travesty Camera Lucida on a regular basis, in their melancholic ruminations on the impossible and heartbreaking absence embodied by every photo in existence. This over-valuation of the photographic image does not sit well with the ‘throw-away’ quality of the Polaroid itself, with the attendant low cultural value that accrues to it, nor, indeed, with the ‘fun’ identified by Barthes as its essential feature. In other words, the polemical value of the stupidity of Polaroid image-making should not be underestimated.
Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath disdained the stupidity of the Polaroid at the height of its fashion, but fashion has since made way for decline and disappearance: the cameras, the film, and the company that invented them are fast approaching extinction. The process of instant film once looked magical, and its inventor, Edwin Land, who at the time of his death in 1991 trailed only Thomas Edison in the all-time list of patent holders, was regularly acclaimed as a technological wizard and was much admired for the model of the research and innovation-led company that he had pioneered. But Polaroid film itself is now quaint, archaic, an object of nostalgia. And the company itself, built up into a personal fiefdom of creative research by Land from the early production of polarizing filters in the 1930s and a blue-chip stock market powerhouse in the late 1960s and again in the late 70s and early 80s, defeating Kodak in a prolonged and landmark patent violation case along the way, has been in freefall since the 1990s, in spite of a brief turnaround in 1998 and 1999 thanks to the small format I-Zone, especially favoured, according to the Financial Times, by Japanese girls. (17) The company was early on the scene in developing digital cameras, but apparently failed to devote enough resources to the new technology. As the Irish Times reported, the tendency within Polaroid was always to ‘give the nod to the pod’ in any developmental strategy, which is to say the pod containing developing reagent at the heart of Land’s invention. (18) A high profile casualty of the advances in digital imaging, the Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2001 while it searched for a buyer. In the rather chilling parcelling up and asset-stripping that took place over the next four years, as the Boston Globe reported, the short-term chairman and CEO walked away with a combined payout of $21.3 million, while retirees got one-off payments of $47 each and saw their healthcare and life insurance schemes eliminated and pensions slashed (and this from a company once noted for relatively progressive labour practices). (19) The Polaroid Corporation itself, at one time the largest employer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is now a phantom operation at its nominal base in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is ‘little more than a brand name’, having been swallowed up in 2005 by a conglomerate holding company, the Petters Group, which attaches the famous name to LCD TVs and portable DVD players, while it waits for the still considerable demand for instant film to gradually dry up. (20)
What, other than morbid satisfactions, can be extracted from this melancholy, if not unique tale of a gradual drift into defeated obsolescence? One possible answer can be found in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which provides a compelling model and justification for the rescue of economic and cultural detritus. Two aspects of Benjamin’s practice of cultural criticism seem especially relevant to the case of Polaroid: (1) the way his ‘micrological’ (the term is Richard Wolin’s (21)) approach leads him to odd, fugitive traces of the material world: the mechanical hen that lays praline eggs, the ruffle on a dress, the arcades themselves; and (2) his fascination above all with objects, practices or architectural forms in decay, or on the point of obsolescence. Writing about Andre Breton, Benjamin claims:
He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear
in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron constructions, the first
factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun
to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago,
fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from
them. (22)
The sentence is dazzling, but as so often with Benjamin, it does not yield up its mysteries easily. Evidently, there is a paradox here: surely, radically new forms of building materials (iron), modes of production (the factory) or modes of reproduction (the photograph) are revolutionary precisely at the point of their emergence and not much later, once they have been superseded? Looking for practical examples, it is just about possible to glimpse how Cocotoos has more radical potential than Obsidian, (23) or how an antiquated mobile phone, circa 2002, is closer to the barricades than Apple’s ‘revolutionary’ new I-phone. Cocotoos and the Siemens A50 have lost their lustre; and they’ve got nothing left to lose: these, and not the satisfaction of being the latest thing, are the conditions needed for revolution. What is more, ‘outmoded’ things have a past and therefore a memory … But before going further, it is worth stopping to reflect that when Walter Benjamin says ‘revolution’, it is a bit like when Roland Barthes claims to be impatient or when Stephen Heath says that something is ‘worth considering’. Experience dictates proceeding with caution in such circumstances.
With all due prudence then: fastening on the outmoded is, in the first instance, a way for Benjamin to distance himself from novelty. He spends a good deal of time in the Arcades Project on the various novelty items (nouveautes) that found their way into the shops of the Parisian arcades, but he expresses suspicion about the bewitching quality of that which passes itself off as the new, when, historically speaking, it is nothing more than ‘eternal return’. The decaying object has long since shed the aura of newness which prevents us from understanding it as anything other than progress, triumphant. Benjamin showed how the dilapidated arcades of the 1920s and 30s formed the basis of an ‘ur-History’ of the department store and the full flowering of commodity consumerism, and thereby pushed back the beginnings of this phenomenon and qualified its supposed novelty.
The wager here is that Stephen Heath’s unanswered question, addressed to the Polaroid at the very height of its mesmerizing novelty, is now more urgent precisely at the point when the technology advances towards obsolescence. For we have not so much left behind the cultural frame of instantaneity opened up by the Polaroid as become absolutely immersed in it. When T.J. Clark spoke in Manchester in 2005 on ‘Modernity and Terror’, in a piece subsequently published under the auspices of the Retort collective, he spoke with great hostility about ‘the model of temporality that consumerism offers its subjects.’ Contemporary consumer society, he said,
stakes everything on celebrating–perpetuating–the here and now.
Lately it has built an extraordinary apparatus to enable
individuals to image, archive, digitalize, objectify, and take
ownership of the passing moment. The here and now is not endurable,
it seems (or at least, not fully real), unless it is told or shown,
immediately and continuously, to others–or to oneself. The
cellphone, the digital replay, instant messaging, ‘real time’
connectivity, the video loop … the gadgetry of instant
objectification … exists to invent a history, a lost time of
togetherness and stability, that everyone claims to remember but no
one quite had … For what is the current all-invasive, portable,
minute-by-minute apparatus of mediation we have pointed to if not
an attempt to expel the banality of the present moment–the dim
actuality of what is happening–from consciousness? (24)
The Polaroid may be dead, then, but its logic is infinitely multiplied in our own age of instantaneous objectification, and Heath’s disingenuous call for an ideological analysis of instant-imaging is here answered in Clark’s nightmare scenario, where a complex array of amnesia-machines masquerade as aids to memory and memorialisation. We do not need to endorse the bleak and far-reaching conclusions drawn by Clark to recognize the actuality of the drive to instantaneity that characterizes our present. The virulence of his attack is something of a tonic when compared with the bland utopianism of the many disciples of a digital dawn, but it also shows the difficulties of trying to diagnose the present in all its mirror-ball trickery. In its semi-fossilised state, by contrast, the recently obsolete technology not only stands more or less still, but gives us a relatively serene point from which to contemplate our contemporary immersion in ‘instantaneous objectification’.
POLAROID CULTURES: FROM STUPIDITY TO INTIMACY
Whether or not the Polaroid ‘instant photograph’ constitutes the pre-history of our own accelerated imaging era, that experience is the background against which any exploration of the technology’s history and meanings necessarily takes place. Of course, the meanings and values accruing to the Polaroid image are plural, since the Polaroid itself is not a single thing, but, as has already been outlined, has taken a number of shapes since 1947. Before considering the ways in which the properties of the technology have taken on signification, it is worthwhile outlining those basic properties. I take these to be three, regardless of which generation of camera:
1. the instant appearance of an image; its speed
2. the absence of any human intervention in the process of development (i.e., the elimination of the darkroom).
3. the singularity of the image–there is no negative, therefore the image is not subject to mechanical reproduction
All three of these properties need to be qualified in light of the history of the technology
1. Speed. What exactly is instantaneous? The original sepia and then black and white peel-apart film, under appropriate climactic conditions, was ready in approximately sixty seconds, hence Polaroid’s advertising slogan in the 1940s and 50s for ‘Pictures-in-a-Minute’. At one stage this was reduced to fifteen seconds, while the Polaroid colour films of the 1960s took anywhere from a minute to a minute and a half to develop; whereas the image from the SX-70 type integral film will materialise more or less completely after six minutes. (25) By contemporary standards this is agonizingly slow. Expectations about speeds of web-site access or how long it should take for an image to form in a mobile phone after capture gives a sense of the relativity of any concept of the ‘instant’: if it were invented now, Polaroid film would have to be called ‘delayed’ photography.
2. No darkroom. In the first generation of Polaroid cameras–1947-72 there was in fact considerable work that needed to be done (and carefully) by the camera operator to ensure the proper development of the image. Pulling the film smoothly through the rollers to burst the pod; timing the development according to climactic conditions; peeling the positive print from the negative, which was thrown away; ensuring no dirt between the rollers, and so on. Only did the SX-70 film eliminate all of this procedure. Nevertheless, all Polaroid cameras dispensed with the need to pass the photos through a public realm (or through a private lab). This short-circuiting of the conventional path of development, perhaps even more than instantaneity, has given the Polaroid its meaning(s).
3. Singularity. Most Polaroid film of both generations produces only a single unique print with no negative. In this sense it goes against the very logic of the photographic, which, since Fox Talbot’s establishment of the positive-negative system, has allowed for infinite reproducibility of any image. From a purely practical and commercial standpoint, this proved something of a drawback for Polaroid, which struggled to attract professional photographers to its film. (26) This led the company in 1961 to introduce Type 55 film which produced a usable negative as well as the instant positive print. Polaroid also ran for many years a Copy Service which allowed photographers to send their prints to a special lab at company HQ.
How have these properties taken on signification and cultural value? My working hypothesis was that the discourse on the Polaroid would emphasize above all what I have cruelly characterized as its ‘stupidity’, treating it in effect as the lowest common denominator of photographic production, as a result of the facility of its operation and the extent of its mass cultural dissemination: the degree zero of photography. Indeed, Nat Trotman has argued that ‘In its quest for an easier consumer-oriented photographic process, Polaroid contributed to a widespread devaluation of the photograph itself’. (27) In this sense, Polaroid can be seen as just one example among many of the gradual automation and mechanisation of human activity in the post-war epoch. Certainly, it is this aspect of the technology that Jacques Lacan may have seized upon in 1954 when he introduces it as part of ‘a little apologue’ on consciousness and the ego in Seminar 2. May, or may not, since he does not directly name the recently invented camera in his modern fable, although Winthrop-Young and Wutz confidently call Lacan’s ‘account of human consciousness as a camera that captures and stores images even when nobody is around … Polaroid consciousness’. (28) Here is what Lacan says:
at the high point of civilization we have attained, which far
surpasses our illusions about consciousness, we have manufactured
instruments which, without in any way being audacious, we can
imagine to be sufficiently complicated to develop film themselves,
put them away into little boxes, and store them in the fridge.
Despite all living beings having disappeared, the camera can
nonetheless record the image of the mountain in the lake, or that
of the Cafe de Flore crumbling away in total solitude. (29)
Here the camera which develops film all by itself becomes a handy allegory for a consciousness severed from any ego, any guiding ‘I’. For Lacan, the greater automation that the Polaroid camera brings to image-making is useful shorthand for the lack of autonomy experienced by the subject of the unconscious. For Friedrich Kittler this is an indication that Lacan was alert to the ways in which technological change have profound implications for human subjectivity, that ‘consciousness is only the imaginary interior of media standards’. (30) It is true that Polaroid led the way in the mechanization of camera-technology in the latter half of the twentieth century, and not just in the self-developing process, but also, for instance, in the introduction of electronics to their cameras in the early 1960s, an innovation then taken up in the wider field of camera manufacture. (31) It is also the case that the speed with which the image appears, the supposed ‘immediacy’ offered by the process, is for Barthes and Heath a key contributor to its low cultural value. On this evidence, then, the technology’s meaning within culture is fairly straightforwardly articulated through a familiarly pejorative discourse whereby automation denudes autonomy, and slowness is a marker of cultural distinction.
However, when we consider in greater detail the camera’s historical relation to modes of consumption, the picture turns out to be rather more complex than this. For one thing, in their original manifestations, Polaroid Land cameras were far from being the cheap mass consumer goods that they eventually became. It would be more accurate to say that they were luxury goods. The first edition, the Model 95 of 1948, retailed at $89.75 and its distribution was very carefully limited. The Model 95, and subsequent new models, were not available from standard camera shops, but were sold exclusively from just one high-end department store in each major city Jordan Marsh in Boston, Macy’s in New York, for example. (32) As Mark Olshaker explains, Kodak did not feel threatened at first by the arrival of Polaroid in a market they dominated because ‘From everything the Kodak engineers had to go by, the first Land cameras would have to be larger, slightly more complex, and–most important–substantially more expensive than the low end of their own product line. The new camera would appeal to a different class of buyer’. (33) Only in 1965 did Polaroid produce a camera for under $50, the very basic Swinger ($20), which was pushed through to subsidize the development program for the SX-70. Even with the SX-70, the emphasis on exclusivity was initially maintained, with Land insisting that it be covered in leather–’expensive, hard to handle, difficult to bond to the camera surface’–clearly a mark of distinction. (34) It was only the relative sales failure of the SX-70 that drove Polaroid to introduce the cheaper models such as the Pronto! (1975) and One-Step (1977) which eventually swept all before.
What is more, the first generation of cameras were far from insured against idiocy, and in fact required considerable skill in their operation, so much so that they merited their own lengthy users’ manuals. The first of these, Pictures in a Minute, was published in 1956 by John Wolbarst, a contributing editor at Modern Photography, who also wrote a monthly column for that magazine on ‘Pictures in a Minute’ and then ‘Pictures in a Moment’ from 1959 to 1966. (35) Ansel Adams, the renowned landscape photographer, and long-time consultant to Polaroid, published a coffee-table-quality guide in 1963 and John Dickson, an English scientist, produced a highly technical one in 1964. (36) From these densely detailed manuals by experts from across the photographic spectrum can be derived the crucial insight that Polaroid photography at one stage took considerable technical skill on the part of its user, who had to negotiate a series of careful technical steps to produce the final image, and who was able, through variation in aperture, exposure and developing time, to intervene significantly in the final outcome of the picture. The importance of these tiny measures of distinction in amateur photography is not to be underestimated, as Bourdieu has shown in Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Adams emphasizes especially what he calls the ‘aesthetic’ qualities of Polaroid film itself, which he favours using in conventional cameras, with all the additional control that gave him (Polaroid constructed a special ‘film holder’ to make it possible to use their film with other cameras). However, in the second edition of his manual, published in 1978, Adams could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for the SX-70, whose film could not be used with conventional cameras and which therefore left little in the way of autonomy for the photographer.
In light of these facts, a second working hypothesis suggests itself: that 1972 marked a turning point, with the development of SX-70 technology, which gives us our dominant idea of the Polaroid camera, displacing and obscuring the previous history. It is true that from this point onwards the cheapness of Polaroid cameras and lack of expertise required to operate them were increasingly emphasized in public discourse on the technology. However, at the same time, partly as a result of the Corporation’s own brand-management, this is also the moment of Polaroid’s move into the gallery and the firm establishment of the aesthetic values of the film in contradistinction to its mass cultural values. The company formalised its corporate photography Collection in the late 1960s, and in 1977 conducted an ad campaign in The New Yorker and similar publications, ‘showing Polaroid pictures taken by distinguished professional photographers and exhibited in the collections of well-known art museums’. (37) That campaign was high profile enough to merit inclusion in Susan Sontag’s ‘Anthology of Quotations’ at the end of On Photography, published that same year. Also worth noting in this context is the construction in 1978 by the Corporation of six enormous cameras which produced 20′x24′ prints. These limited edition 20×24 cameras were (and continue to be) rented out on an exclusive basis to professional artist-photographers who must go to the cameras in order to ‘stage’ the pictures in front of them. Thus, through the intervention of the artist and the strict limitation on availability, Polaroid products were rescued for artifact-quality.
In addition to fine art photographers, fine artists, increasingly forced to reposition themselves with regard to authenticity and uniqueness in the age of simulation, seized in their numbers on the Polaroid image, and especially the SX-70 print. Part of the appeal of the Polaroid is of course its singularity, the fact that it is not subject to mechanical reproduction, although it is imminently open to manipulation, since its dyes take up to 48 hours to harden completely, during which time the image emulsion can be scratched, dented or otherwise doctored. As a consequence, the SX-70 print ‘has … a commonality with painting and sculpture’, and can be quite naturally recycled for the discourse of fine art. (38) And as Peter Schjedahl has said of fine artists taking up the camera, ‘theirs has been a disproportionate share of the most inventive and powerful instant photography’, because they have responded ‘speedily and freshly to anomalies of the new technology’. (39) Although it is most often cited as an amateur ‘party camera’, to be passed from user to user in collective and public acts of picture-making, the Polaroid can also take credit for spawning a more private practice, allowing the amateurs who used it, in a less ubiquitously pornographic age, to take erotic pictures of themselves. Fine artists without dark room training have equally hit on this possibility and brought it into the public sphere. Most notable among these is Lucas Samaras, who in his Auto-Polaroids (1969-71) produced a series of ostentatious self-portraits in various assumed guises without either training in photography or relying on a professional photographer. He remarked at the time, ‘the speed with which a result is obtained without outside help and the complete privacy available afforded me an opportunity of doing something impossible with regular photography’. (40) And as British situationist Ralph Rumney has noted, ‘one of the points about it is, you can take all those photographs that you wouldn’t dare take round to the corner shop to have developed’. (41) It is this practice and meaning of the Polaroid that the playwright Mark Ravenhill sums up with typical economy in the title of his play Some Explicit Polaroids (1999). Indeed, one needs only observe the image emerging from the machine, like some sort of excrement of the visible, to recognize the basic obscenity of the whole thing.
There are numerous examples in wider circulation of the explicitness promised by the Polaroid. To take just three, from different media: in the opening scenes of Julio Medem’s Lucia y el sexo (2001), as the eponymous heroine is informed of the suicide of her boyfriend, she discovers a heap of sexually explicit Polaroids (provenance unknown) in their shared apartment. In Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling rifles through Catherine Martin’s room and finds a stash of Polaroids ‘of a man and woman coupling. No hands or faces appeared … The man wore … a carved ivory ring on his penis’. (42) Finally in the second episode of season four of The O.C. Summer’s promiscuous college room-mate Amber has adorned a wall with Polaroid snaps of fellow students she has slept with, the wall functioning as a trophy-case.
What to make of these rather disparate examples, and the many more that could be cited? First, it would be a mistake to concentrate solely on what Ravenhill identifies as the ‘explicit’ in the Polaroid image. This cliche of the Polaroid has come about largely as a result of the second basic property of the technology, the side-stepping of the darkroom. But when the other two main properties, the speed of developing and, the singularity of the print are taken into consideration, a slightly modified meaning tends to emerge. The Polaroid image, over and above the sexually illicit, signifies intimacy. It is a word used by Schjeldahl to account for the ‘feeling of tender, itchy, erotic closeness’ that he finds in fine art Polaroid photography, (43) but I want to use the term slightly differently here, in the specialized sense developed by Georges Bataille in his Theory of Religion among other places. Intimacy, in his formulation, is precisely that which is barred to us, forever lost by the advent of subject and object. In contrast to the human subject, Bataille hypothesises the undifferentiated experience of the animal, which eats its fellow creature without objectifying it. As he puts it, ‘the animal is in the world like water in water … there is, for the wolf, a continuity between itself and the world’. (44) Intimacy, in the Bataillean sense, is an impossible immanence, a conjunction of immediacy and proximity. This is what the Polaroid often promises, when it is asked to signify.
While we could and probably should contest Bataille’s essentialising of the wolf, his wolf-ism, and certainly don’t have to sign up to his project (recovering that lost intimacy by plotting sacrificial rites in the Bois de Boulogne), the concept is still valuable to analyse the discourse on the Polaroid, whose supposed ‘simplicity’, ‘immediacy’, and so on, are so regularly invoked. It also helps us understand why the Polaroid has so often been associated with children, who are also reputed to be closer to the intimate experience of the world outlined by Bataille. For instance, when Polaroid announced the new SX-70 system in 1972, Edwin Land appeared on the cover of Life magazine under the rubric ‘A Genius and his Magic Camera’, demonstrating the new marvel surrounded by an enrapt group of children, as if he were some sort of photographic pied piper. This clutch of urchins reaches out as a single mass to grasp the print at the very moment that it emerges from the new camera. The message this photograph sends us is that these kids get it instinctively–like animals, they are water in water …
A similar, if more viscerally expressed conclusion is reached in what is perhaps the most perceptive portrait we have of the Polaroid user. In the first version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) a van-load of callow youth pick up a hitch-hiker on the way to their doom. After describing in detail the workings of the slaughterhouse and the parts of the cow which are boiled down into head cheese, the hitchhiker borrows the knife of wheelchair-bound Franklin in order to cut himself on the forearm. He then displays a razor blade pulled from the fur pouch around his neck before opening up the Polaroid Automatic (circa 1965-70) also hanging around his neck. Pointing it in turn at all the occupants of the van, the hitchhiker eventually snaps Franklin. Shortly afterwards, he produces the finished picture, demanding two dollars for it. Franklin declines, and the hitcher pulls from his medicine pouch a piece of tin foil; places the indistinct image on the tin foil; heaps what must be gunpowder on it, and sets the pyre alight. While it is still blazing, he crumples the foil up, print and all, and stuffs it into his fur pouch. Thrown out of the van, he wipes his bloodied hand along the side, so that it might later be identified by his brother Leatherface.
With his little fur pouch, his ritualised cutting and burning, his relation to blood, the squatting position he adopts, his excitability and incoherent speech, it seems pretty clear that we are meant to read this figure as a sort of grand guignol pastiche of the modern primitive, a motley shaman with his little medicine bag. Indeed, the source of horror in this film is not so much the prospect of death by chainsaw, but the primordialism of the family of slaughterhouse workers who turn their modern industrial profession into a sacrificial rite conducted on humans. They are terrifying because of the intimacy they have with the natural world and with their fellow creatures.
It is a version of this concept of intimacy that Jean Baudrillard, at bottom a Bataillean, is getting at when he reflects briefly on the Polaroid in America, his book on what he calls the ‘last primitive civilization’: the United States. Baudrillard brushes aside the possible reading of the technology in terms of imaginary satisfactions and announces instead the arrival of the ‘video phase’:
The ecstasy of the Polaroid is of the same order: to hold the
object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of
light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was
thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up
with our eyes has become a reality. It is a dream. It is the
optical materialization of a magical process. The Polaroid photo is
a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real
object. (45)
While the cover of Life magazine invokes magic in its weak, modern sense, in order to describe the technical ingenuity and trickery of the camera, Baudrillard invokes magic in its stronger, archaic sense, as a fundamental structure of belief; and he makes clear that he sees this as a sort of throwback. And indeed, in terms of the history of technology, that is exactly what it is. If Polaroid technology is rapidly heading for obsolescence, in a way it was already archaic to begin with. As Susan Sontag and many others have pointed out, the basic principle of the process, to fairly rapidly produce a direct positive with no negative, harks back to the very beginnings of photography and the daguerreotype. (46) In addition, at a time when roll film was more or less permanently displacing plates as the receiving surface for light, Polaroid persisted in using what was, in effect, the original plate format; and it still effectively uses a plate system in the cameras which remain. If what Baudrillard (and T.J. Clark for that matter, but from a rather different political position) diagnoses in the instantaneous image is a technological atavism, we can add to this, therefore, the atavism of the technology itself.
The ‘magic’ of the Polaroid and its historically ambivalent relation to circuits of cultural distinction are in fact closely connected, as the modern example of telecommunications paraphernalia also demonstrates. The atavism elicited by the Polaroid is as nothing when compared with the anguished psychical investment and cultural over-valuation exacted by the new media apparatus in our interactions with it. Technology, in the standard thesis of Weber or Thomas, drives out the witches and wizards and their claims over nature, which it can manipulate with much greater superiority: indeed, in this argument, technology, and the capitalism that nurtures it, is instrumental in the disenchantment of the world, even if its ingenuity tempts us to call it magical in the weak sense because we don’t know exactly how it works. (47) However, the intimacy promised by this technology and by instant imaging in general suggests that magical thinking in the stronger sense is by no means incompatible with a wider consumer capitalism, which, in spite of what Weber’s rationalization thesis might tell us, has more than its fair share of fetishisms.
The research for this article has been generously supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. Thanks also to Barbara Hitchcock at the Polaroid Collection, Waltham, MA, and Tim Mahoney at the Baker Library, Harvard.
(1.) See, for example, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988, pp1-5; or Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986, pp83-90. Some partisans of Barthes were also dismayed. See, for instance, Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After, London, Methuen, 1982, p210; and Jonathan Culler, Barthes, Glasgow, Fontana, p116.
(2.) Liz Wells (ed), The Photography Reader, London, Routledge, 2003.
(3.) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard (trans), London, Fontana, 1984, pp6-7.
(4.) Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (trans), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, pxxxix.
(5.) Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (trans), Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-34, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp507-30.
(6.) Anon., ‘Polaroid President Invents New Camera That produces Finished Print in One Minute’, The Camera, 69, 4 (April, 1947): 52-3, 52. Ralph Samuels, ‘A New One-Minute Process’, Minicam Photography, 10, 8 (May 1947): 20-4 & 129-33, 20. Diagrammatic representation of first Polaroid camera published in newspapers
(7.) Anon., ‘The sensational one-step Process’, U.S. Camera 10: 4 (April 1947): 21 & 83, 21. Anon., ‘Notes and News’, American Photography, 41:4 (April 1947): 4 & 61, 4.
(8.) Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the present, rev. ed., New York, MOMA, 1982, p281.
(9.) Roland Barthes, op. cit., p9.
(10.) Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative Space’ [1976], in Philip Rosen (ed), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp379-420, p388.
(11.) The ‘One-Step’, a non-folding, single focus camera using SX-70 integral film was launched in 1977 and was the market leader for the next four years. Nicole Columbus (ed), Innovation/ Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1999, p119.
(12.) Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, p14.
(13.) See Edwin H. Land, ‘Absolute OneStep Photography’, Photographic Journal 114 (1974): 338-45.
(14.) Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed), Alan Sheridan (trans), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, p268.
(15.) Jacques-Alain Miller (ed), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55, Sylvana Tomaselli (trans), New York, Norton, 1988, p50.
(16.) Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Bruce Fink (trans), New York, Norton, 2006, p76.
(17.) Victoria Griffith, ‘Polaroid plunges into bankruptcy protection’, Financial Times, 13/10/01, p18.
(18.) Conor O’Clery, ‘Polaroid shutter closes for last time as debt reaches $1bn’, Irish Times, 17/10/01, p19.
(19.) Anon., ‘Bad Image for Polaroid’, Boston Globe 2/05/05, pA10. To call these professional short-term CEOs piratical is to do a disservice to pirates, who at least operate without the assistance of corporate lawyers and the endorsement of government.
(20.) Jeffrey Krasner, ‘Polaroid cuts R &D, Digital Plans under new owner, Firm is little more than brand name’, Boston Globe 2/08/05, pC1. Andrea Miller, ‘The Transformation of Polaroid’, Petters Group Magazine, (Summer 2006): 44-7, 44.
(21.) Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, p121.
(22.) Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), One-Way Street and other writings, Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (trans), London, Verso, 1979, pp22539, p229.
(23.) Restaurants in Manchester.
(24.) Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London, Verso, 2005, pp181-3.
(25.) Ansel Adams, Polaroid Land Photography, 2nd ed, Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1978, pp61-2 & 66.
(26.) As the President of the Royal Photographic Society had predicted. See Percy W. Harris, ‘The Year’s Progress’, The Photographic Journal, 89, (March 1949): 59-63, 62.
(27.) Nat Trotman, ‘The Life of the Party’, Afterimage 29:6, (May/June, 2002): 10.
(28.) Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, ‘Translators’ Introduction’ in Kittler, Gramophone, op. cit., ppxi-xxxviii, pxviii.
(29.) Lacan, Seminar 2, op. cit., p46. 30. John Johnston (ed), Friedrich A. Kittler: literature, media, information systems, Amsterdam, Overseas Publishers Association, 1997, p132.
(31.) See William J. McCune and Bernadine Cassell, ‘Simplifying Camera Technology: Polaroid’s Pioneering Efforts’, Journal of Imaging Technology, 17:2 (April/May 1991): 62-66.
(32.) Mark Olshaker, The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience, New York, Stein and Day, 1978, pp61-3.
(33.) Ibid., p57.
(34.) Peter C. Wensberg, Land’s Polaroid: A Company and the man who invented it, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, p211.
(35.) John Wolbarst, Pictures in a Minute, New York, American Photographic Book Publishing Co., 1956.
(36.) Adams, op. cit., John Dickson, Instant Pictures, London, Pelham Books, 1964.
(37.) Olshaker, The Instant Image, op. cit., p241.
(38.) Peter Schjedahl, ‘The Instant Age’, in Constance Sullivan (ed), Legacy of Light, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, pp813, p9.
(39.) Ibid., p11.
(40.) Lucas Samaras, ‘Autopolaroid’, Art in America, 58:6, (November/ December 1970): 66-83, 66.
(41.) Alan Woods, The Map is not the Territory, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p149.
(42.) Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs, London, Arrow, 1988, p204.
(43.) Peter Schjedahl, ‘The Instant Age’, op. cit., p12.
(44.) Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Robert Hurley (trans), New York, Zone Books, 1992, pp24-5.
(45.) Jean Baudrillard, America, Chris Turner (trans), London, Verso, 1988, p37.
(46.) Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, p125.
(47.) See Max Weber, General Economic History, F.H. Knight (trans), New York, Collier Books, 1961, pp260-5 and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p775.
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