One Time, One Meeting

Last month I read a book I hadn’t intended to read. Entitled The Camera Does the Rest, it is an illustrated history of the Polaroid camera. Its author, Peter Buse, chronicles the creation, the triumphant success, and the sad demise of the Polaroid phenomenon in twentieth-century American culture. More broadly, he assesses the impact of Edwin Land’s brilliant if rather bulky invention, once considered near-miraculous, in the history of photography. There had been nothing quite like it before, and though it foretold the digital era, its unique properties have yet to be fully replicated by digital technology.

I ordered Buse’s book in August 2016, shortly after it was published, with the intent of giving it to my friend and colleague Ted Morgan. Ted had recently retired from teaching and was suffering from a serious illness. A master printmaker and Emeritus Professor of Printmaking at the New York State College of Ceramics, he had turned in the latter part of his career to photography as his principal medium. Ted had long been fascinated by Polaroid cameras, and in March 2014, an exhibition at Alfred University’s Fosdick-Nelson Gallery featured a group of his small, black-and-white Polaroid photos, in which he explored the play of light and shadow in reclusive, unpeopled places.  Given this interest on Ted’s part, I thought that our friend might enjoy reading about his favorite camera during his convalescence.

That was not to happen. When Ted’s condition dramatically worsened, he went home to Ohio to be with his family, and we lost contact. Shortly thereafter, he passed away. For the next eight months his intended gift, still in its pristine, shrink-wrapped state, rested on a bookshelf in my study, a reminder of Ted’s life, work, and unexpected passing. But in August, I decided to open the book and read it, partly in Ted’s memory. To my surprise, it proved engrossing.

Generously illustrated with color photos of and by the various Polaroid models—the Swinger, the SX-70, the Spectra—Buse’s detailed study traces the development of the camera from its introduction in 1947 to its discontinuation in 2008. At the same time, he poses two general questions: What, exactly, was unique about the Polaroid camera, and what purpose or purposes did it serve?

Over its sixty-year life-span, both the identity and the market of the Polaroid brand continued to evolve. Initially this inspired invention, manufactured by a small company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was regarded as a toy and promoted as such. As its popularity grew, however, the camera came to be seen, by its maker and users alike, as what Buse calls a “technology for memory”: a means of preserving moments from family gatherings, holidays, and the like. Because its novelty attracted attention, it also gained a reputation as a conversation piece, a social lubricant, and a “party camera.” Toward the end of its lifetime, as its circle of enthusiasts expanded to include the cultural elite, this mass-produced camera found favor with professional artists and photographers, among them Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams. Yet, although its forms and purposes multiplied over the decades, the Polaroid camera managed to retain its two most salient attributes, which set it apart from all other cameras.

First and most apparent was its capacity to generate so-called “instant” photos. This distinctive feature fostered a relationship of spontaneity, candor, and interactivity between photographer and subject. The camera produced a finished, unalterable photo—a material object, not a fluid digital image—a minute after the picture was taken. The photo was as fresh as the experience itself. That photo could then be given to the subject, or shown to others, or kept as a souvenir. Photographer, subject, and whoever might be present took part in this intimate, seemingly magical process.

Second, a Polaroid photo was one of a kind. It could not be reproduced. Since Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the “positive-negative” process in 1839, that process had yielded a negative as well as a positive image. From that negative, more copies could be made. By contrast, Polaroid’s was a “direct-positive” process: it produced no usable negative. As Buse observes, the overall direction of photography, most evident in its recent, digital forms, has been toward the multiplication of images from a single shot. As if returning to the days of the daguerreotype, the Polaroid process produced, in Buse’s phrase, a “singular image.”

Perhaps it was that absolute singularity, joined with the open, “as-it-was-happening” character of Polaroid snapshots, that attracted Ted to the Polaroid camera. Regrettably, I never asked him. In any event, those qualities have something essential in common with Zen practice, which also centers our attention on the dynamic present moment. However dull or exciting that moment may seem, Zen teachings tell us, it is unprecedented and unrepeatable. All the more reason to treat it with care, presence, and respect, as Ted Morgan did in his life and art.

Peter Buse, The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography, University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Untitled Polaroid photo by Ted Morgan (2014).