Polaroid Instant Film

Polaroid instant film was, for half a century, the closest thing analog photography had to magic: a chemical packet that turned light into a finished, held-in-your-hand photograph in front of your eyes. There was no lab, no negative, no waiting — you pressed the shutter, a print whirred out, and an image swam up from grey to full color while you watched. For decades that small miracle was a fixture of birthdays, real-estate listings, police evidence rooms, and art studios alike.

The format was the life’s work of Edwin Land, a brilliant and famously single-minded inventor whose Polaroid Corporation introduced instant photography to the public with the Model 95 Land Camera in 1948. Land kept pushing the chemistry toward his ideal of a fully integral, dry, one-step print, a vision realized in the elegant SX-70 of 1972 and then democratized by the cheap, foolproof OneStep and the ubiquitous Polaroid 600 series.

What killed it was not a better instant camera but the disappearance of the underlying need. Digital cameras let people see images instantly on a screen and discard the failures for free; camera phones then put that capability in every pocket. The instant print, once the only way to get a photograph immediately, became a slow and expensive way to get a worse one. Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2008, and in February 2008 announced it would stop manufacturing instant film and close its film factories.

The story did not end there. A small group of enthusiasts called the Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid film factory in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 2008 and spent years reinventing the discontinued chemistry from scratch. They succeeded, kept millions of vintage cameras alive, and eventually acquired the Polaroid brand itself — rebranding as Polaroid Originals in 2017 and simply Polaroid in 2020. Instant film today is a thriving analog niche, with Fujifilm’s Instax booming alongside it.

Kodachrome

Kodachrome was a color reversal (slide) film made by Eastman Kodak, introduced in 1935 as 16mm movie film and in 1936 in the 35mm format that would make it famous. For most of the twentieth century it set the standard for what color photography could look like: fine grain, biting sharpness, and saturated yet believable hues that, crucially, did not fade. The film holds an unusual place in the history of invention because its core chemistry was worked out not by career chemists but by two professional musicians, Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, who pursued the problem as a private obsession before Kodak put its laboratories behind them.

What made Kodachrome extraordinary also made it fragile as a business. Unlike later films, it carried no color couplers in the emulsion itself; the colors were built in during development, in a fiendishly precise sequence that became known as the K-14 process. That process could only be run by specialized labs with the right equipment and chemistry, never at home and never at a corner drugstore. The result was a film prized by professionals and serious amateurs but tethered to an infrastructure that only Kodak and a handful of licensed labs could sustain.

For decades that bargain held. Kodachrome recorded some of the most reproduced images of the century, from Steve McCurry’s 1984 portrait later known as “Afghan Girl” to Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie footage of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Paul Simon gave it a place in popular memory with his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” a song about color and nostalgia that doubled as free advertising.

The arrival of simpler color films, and then of digital capture, dissolved the demand that the K-14 infrastructure required. Kodak announced the film’s discontinuation on June 22, 2009, and the last certified lab finished the final rolls in early 2011. Kodachrome did not so much lose a competition as outlive the world that could support it.