Part 1

Histories

Polaroids are shackled to nostalgia. Its aesthetic perfectly embodies the past tense, especially in the cold light of today’s digital world. The presence captured, however, makes even the oldest photos whisper of the living moment as it happened. As an object, they are driven by this contradiction.

Being so close to our lives charges these images with supernatural static. But, more importantly, it makes discussing them in purely historical or technical terms perfunctory.

Many books tell of the history of instant photography’s development, from the laboratories of Edwin Land through to guides on how to use the cameras, and finally explorations of work by those who have achieved interesting results with the camera. The everyday nature of the Polaroid makes it susceptible to these approaches and there are tellingly just as many books of Polaroids published by rock stars as by photographers.

A list of these books would be long, from manuals to coffee table volumes. Yet, as much as their merits are vast, the secrecy of the Polaroid lying next to me on the table as I type would remain untouched by their various investigations.

Why is this photo interesting? Is it interesting at all? I saved it from a skip some years ago when several photographs littered a pile of debris from a house clearance on The Wirral, thrown away like bad memories. If only real memories could be discarded so easily.

Polaroids ask for stories to be told, so let us start there. The cat in the photo is a kitten, perhaps a first cat or even a new one replacing a recently lost, beloved pet. With everything but the back wall being some shade of brown, it is likely the mid-1970s. Most interesting is the photo’s inscription, a caption written from the perspective of the kitten. It is hypnotised by the endless moving images of programmes, though the camera does not pick them up.

The writing makes it feel alive, as if the day it was taken happened moments before I dusted away the remains of bathroom debris from its surface. I half expected the ink to still smudge or to spot the small cat looking out from a nearby window.

Sadly, this was dead time. Those feelings were spectral, nothing more.

Previous photography critics have been coldly immune to such illusory time-slips. Older writing either ignored or dismissed these strange resonances.

The cultural and political philosopher Walter Benjamin was writing before the invention of instant photography though he at least seemed to expect the Polaroid in his critical work. ‘Cameras are getting smaller and smaller,’ he wrote, ‘more and more able to capture fleeting, secret images, the impact of which stalls the viewer’s association mechanism.’

What format but the Polaroid could have realised this so casually and yet so completely?

Writer Susan Sontag discusses the Polaroid briefly in her pivotal book On Photography, but rarely discusses it in reference to anything other than its technical innovations and usually as a symptom of photography’s increasingly pervasive commercialisation of every lived instant. The Polaroid is evidence of photography going backwards for Sontag, a machine that ‘revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each print is a unique object.’

Equally, the instantaneous quality is described as reducing lived experience rather than being a part of it. ‘Photographs furnish instant history,’ Sontag writes, ‘instant sociology, instant participation. But there is something remarkably anodyne about these new forms of packaging reality.’

The striking element of Sontag’s argument is how pre-digital it seems. The Polaroid feels positively patient in comparison to the overwhelming mountains of instant digital photography today; a form that is a far more successful commodifier compared to any analogue equivalent.

Another photographic analyst John Berger focussed his ideas chiefly on 35mm photographers. With Berger’s thinking being so characteristically broad, his writing has much to say about the Polaroid, even if he generally ignored them. Berger sees photography as the endless reproduction of the singular. ‘By their nature,’ he argues, ‘photographs have little or no property value because they have no rarity value. The very principle of photography is that the resulting image is not unique, but on the contrary infinitely reproducible.’ He sits in contradiction to Sontag’s vision of a Polaroid’s uniqueness.

Unlike other forms, however, Polaroids have a finished original. The original of all other forms is either a negative or simply digital data.

I worry over their uniqueness every time I take my own Polaroid photos, feeling especially nervous about them after going to the effort of travelling to photograph and visit somewhere. How vulnerable I feel when carrying their captured moments away. They become precious cargo.

Thoughts of losing my photos on the train or having them drop out of the pages of a book forever plague me. If I travel for a few hours back to The Wirral, say, to photograph a golf course that inspired a scene from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, my nerves will be a wreck by the time I get the photo anywhere near a scanner.

The images are rare because they actually are unique, often my only companions and witnesses of my wanderings to places few are interested in. Only once a Polaroid is scanned into a computer does it fit into Berger’s thinking. But not before.

Berger also believes, quite reasonably, that photography only contains its own minor fragment of time. He uses drawing as a comparison, as drawing contains far more compressed time due to the hours put in, whether a Sempé, a Beatrix Potter or Leonardo da Vinci. ‘The only time contained in a photograph is the isolated instant of what it shows,’ he suggests. Aside from ignoring the sometimes huge preparation that can go into any given photographic shoot, I think again of the Polaroid and its resistance to these ideas.

I remember the small one of a party I unpinned from a friend’s wall in a student flat to look at more closely, and how I recoiled at the dried but still sticky remains of blue alcopop on its corner. The smell of the cheap vodka and sugary mixer made the dark photo of a club even more potent. Time was marking the photo far beyond its instant and its image.

Through both its instant existence and its handy pocket-sized form, the Polaroid gains time and meaning beyond its image. Berger’s thinking was based on the idea that the only time measured in an artwork was the time that went into physically making it. The Polaroid shows the fallacy of such a belief.

Finally, out of the great classical photography scholars, there is Roland Barthes. Contrary to his reductive view quoted earlier, Barthes does give the Polaroid some due, writing that it can produce interesting results when a great photographer is involved. But that is all.

All of these writers have much to say, either accidentally or in ghostly foreshadow, regarding the power of the Polaroid. But more importantly, looking at the Polaroid with their ideas in mind shows the assumption of the destination of a photograph. These assumptions are casually subverted by the Polaroid.

It is the most unlikely rebel.

…

The instant camera creates an object that participates on some level in the moment. The anonymous author of the Polaroid of the kitten probably lived with that photo in the moments just after it was taken. Perhaps they watched it develop seconds after what we can still see of its moment today, or sat in a chair as the kitten played while they amusingly captioned its thoughts with a pen.

Living, breathing life is momentarily drawn out by these bizarre curios.

I think of a moment in Edinburgh with an ex-partner in 2012 when experimenting with that toyish Polaroid camera I first used in Liverpool. We took each other’s photo while sat in a café hiding from rain, and then took photos of the Polaroids using our phones. I spilt coffee on them before we left and have no idea what happened to them, but the photos participated in that moment in a deeper way than merely showing the fragment of exposed time in the image. Looking at the digital photo in hindsight, it exhibits a strangely multi-dimensional quality. Time has passed between the creation of these images and the Polaroids have keenly measured it.

Photography contains multiple histories, with destinations far beyond what has been assumed in the past. If cameras are gravediggers of the moment, then the Polaroid is the most effective memorial to what has just been. It throws the perception of life around us into temporal flux. Held in my hand moments after taking it, I find the Polaroid to be a strange proposition. I am half-filled with suspicion about it, perhaps even superstition. Behind a Polaroid’s haunted presence, therefore, is a question.

What is the point of a photograph?

Postcards

If we decide to take a photograph, casually or creatively, we assume something within that choice: namely the destination of the photo after the button has been pressed. This seems disarmingly simple for a Polaroid: printed immediately afterwards and slipped into a pocket or between the pages of a book. Perhaps it is unpacked later at home and stored away for future viewing. If it is lucky, it is framed and spoiled with endless gazes until the daylight finally fades it to a foggy imprint.

Something that underpins so much writing on photography is the simplification of a photograph’s destination. All of what has just been described occurred after the Polaroid reached its destination, and is often dismissed as being part of the photographic process in spite of such equivalents actually being the main focus of analysis in other forms of photography. By the time some photographs have finally come into existence, the Polaroid has already been ageing and living.

In reality, the various gaps, hiccups and delays to said journey, especially for non-instant forms of photography, are notable by their absence in photographic writing, as well as the potential afterlife of a photo just described. We edit out the stumbles of this journey on both sides of the photograph, beginning from the exact moment any photographer snaps their picture.

What I really mean by destination is quite simple in photographic terms: the point at which the photograph is finished as an object; there in our hands and ready on some level to be viewed. This is undoubtedly an analogue frame of mind as the idea is blurred by digital culture, but it is not something I can resist.

This sensibility creates the potential for a photograph’s afterlife. For example, the reproduction of images in this very book, the copying of images for posters, book covers, magazine spreads, websites and everything in between; all ghostly echoes of the original. Benjamin’s ideas surrounding art in the age of mechanical reproduction come to mind.

That first, definitive moment of existence when the subject was captured in a photograph is often assumed. Photography is an art of hindsight, and writing about photography is even more imbued with foreknowledge. We jump too early towards its wider destination; and what that frozen moment tells us. And then we move on too quickly, assuming the subject we see to be a full stop in the discussion.

Most photographs have a life outside of this simplified journey. In fact, the majority of images we see today are far beyond this point, and all forms of photography have different ways of getting there. Instantly, the reason why the Polaroid is of interest should leap out, with possessing perhaps the most solid and uniquely fixed primary destination of all: to completely exist closely to the moment of capture.

Jacques Derrida, the celebrated and verbose French philosopher, writes in his 1980 book The Postcard how destination can, when taken into account, actively shift our interpretation of ideas. In spite of doing this to address complex philosophical and psychoanalytical problems, he begins his deconstruction through looking at another form of visual communication: the postcards of the book’s title.

The postcard has a surprising number of things in common with the Polaroid, perhaps explaining why you can buy so many postcards that now deliberately look like Polaroids. They are compact, momentary and visually driven. They have come to symbolise memories and, in particular, personal, everyday memories, especially of holidays. Most importantly, they have both been trivialised as to their unique and sometimes unintentionally mysterious qualities.

Derrida chose the postcard as an object quite specifically and not just to humanise his high-minded, often obtuse ideas. The postcard is an object whose destination is even more assumed than a photograph. It is literally designed to travel from A to B. In reality, its journey is filled with multitudes when we consider what is really being sent.

As Derrida describes it in his typically obscure way, a straightforward journey simply cannot exist for something like a postcard. It may be a piece of card with a twee image and simple message, but its information, personal and perhaps unique, travels too. ‘There is no destination’, he writes cryptically, suggesting that the possibility of infinite destinations for such information renders its assumed, final physical destination oversimplified.

We assume, when not seen through the eyes of a tricksy twentieth-century post-structuralist, that the postcard – banal image on the front (let us say of the Isle of Wight), succinct message on the back – will have a direct destination. It is posted to one after all, and a postage stamp for philosophical infinitude would be unimaginably expensive.

The postcard will, so we believe, travel from where it was posted to the place where it is sent and that is that. But Derrida sees a multitude of destinations on its journey because both object and subject travel, producing what he describes as ‘incalculable consequences.’ The object may physically travel from one place to another, but its subject and information may travel much further and along far more improbable routes. This functions generally as a metaphor for all photography.

A tired postman may see the image on the postcard when taking it out of a seaside post-box. The sorting office will be forced to look at it in order to make sure it continues on its journey, the sorter maybe even reading its message or staring at the seaside innuendo on the front in a moment of boredom.

The postman on the other side may catch sight of the image as well, and briefly segue into memories of when he and his partner visited the Isle of Wight decades earlier; how he wishes the innuendo on the front rekindled more than just the dusty memory of a moribund sex life.

The receiver will read and enjoy the shared moment, and then where? Perhaps the postcard will be stuck on the fridge to be seen by visiting family or neighbours, maybe taken off by a nosy relative for closer inspection, or hidden from the kids who are filled with awkward questions as to why a suspiciously erect seaside hotdog is funny.

Later, it could be given to the charity shop by grieving children after the death of the parental receiver, bought again, used for decoration by an irony hungry Millennial, cut up to make a collage for an arts degree project about phallic symbols, find its way into the hands of a writer desperate for ideas like myself, or merely conclude its life as a fragment of landfill on the outskirts of a lonely city, finally to be seen by no one except the disappointed gulls.

In photography, we naturally focus on the incalculable consequences and assume they are their raison d’être of photography; skipping the primary destination as most photographs seen are beyond that point, printed from the developed negative or a digital image never physically existing at all. The Polaroid is the only kind of photo where the primary destination can also be how it is viewed, and its afterlife is not merely its development, its blow-up or its scanning, but its ageing and engagement with the physical world. Its wider journey starts much earlier, which may be why all of the interesting things that happen to it afterwards are ignored.

35mm as a form has a complex and more convoluted destination than a Polaroid because it avoids the moment of capture once exposed to its fraction of light. It simply must avoid what the Polaroid openly revels in if it is to survive. It is protected in its camera and shuns the world, otherwise the glare of the continuing present would annihilate its tiny grain. It may be immortalised chemically but it is still not set in physical reality. It could easily be destroyed before ever being seen again. This extra level of journey means that 35mm photos are certainly less charged as objects, if they eventually appear as objects at all today.

35mm has never quite existed in the context of the wider moment being documented. It exists at the point of development of its negatives, and perhaps its initial printing (and, now, scanning so it can swim online with its digital cousins). But all of this is far away from the moment of capture. This is not to underestimate the form. On the contrary, 35mm is the definitive photograph yet to be surpassed. But to say that it is less charged and less irradiated by living with us is absolutely true.

There is a reason why John Berger rightly suggests there to be an ‘abyss’ between the photograph and the fragment it records. Photography appears to be filled with abysses. There is a potentially endless gap when 35mm is concerned, exemplified by stories of people developing reels of found photographs decades after they were first taken. Next to my box of rustling Polaroids are several found rolls of 35mm, still undeveloped. They sit in patient silence. Who knows what could be on them.

…

I found in my archive of photos a pair of images from around a decade ago that illustrates the contrast between the two forms nicely. The two photos were taken quite by chance, far from the idea of handily proving a point in a book about photography. The coincidence highlights the truth of the point to me.

The first photo is of a woman, my ex-partner again from several years back. The photo was taken on a 35mm Lomography camera, a small black box with a fixed wide-angle lens and a turner to wind the reel back. The turner had such sharp grips that it threatened the thumb and index finger with bleeding. I remember debating with her who would be forced to rewind the finished reel, moving excitedly onto the next with sore thumbs.

For me, this pair of photos contains the beginning of the end of our relationship. I did not recognise it so tangibly then in the 35mm photo but only became aware of such a distinction after I had got the reel back a week or so later. The excitement that usually took over when flicking through the photos turned to something that could not then be so easily defined; an unnameable sadness or loss in hindsight. It showed the growing division between us, emotionally mimicking our own physical divide, being a long distance relationship between Liverpool and the Scottish university town of St. Andrews.

We were far from either city in this photo, instead in Glasgow for belated celebrations of our anniversary. Having naïvely booked a weekend in the town of Dumfries after seeing a lovely picture of a castle nearby – a digital picture no less, the most effective form of photographic lie – our arrival was marked with despair at the reality of our choice. We had no car, we were both poor and there was roughly a takeaway and a Sainsbury’s to entertain us. The castle from the photo was too far to visit on foot and we were both grumpy due to the misjudgement.

In the hotel room that evening, spurred on by the hope of saving the trip, we opted to take the train and explore Glasgow the next day, armed with both my Lomography box and the toy-like camera I took my first Polaroids on.

After wandering for hours, and with a growing silence between us that could not be emotionally translated, we found ourselves sitting in the sun on Glasgow Green; a park overlooking the River Clyde and the high-rise buildings on the other side of the murky water.

I had taken the photo of my partner sat next to me looking arresting, though she had a habit of covering her face in photos as one of her typical poses. I was to mimic her when it came to my turn for having a picture taken, hiding behind the Lomography camera. But, essentially, she took a Polaroid.

I am holding the Lomography box that took the photo of her. Perhaps neither of us could face having the truth of that moment revealed in some way in our eyes. As I think back now, I wanted the pair to fake a sense of happening vaguely simultaneously, something that does not work in hindsight unless, like the man in Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera, she had somehow fixed a camera permanently within her eye.

The irony that I no longer have this Polaroid and have only retained it via a digital photo is not lost on me. But what was I thinking when this photo came into being? After it had developed, I was shocked at how ghostly I looked, as if my body was threatening to fade into a white haze; a common effect of the camera’s unforgiving flash. It was a perfect visual rendition of the depression that heavily shrouded everything then.

The Polaroid captured this aspect, and I watched it unfold in real-time as the photo was there. I looked at it almost like a mirror, an illusion heightened by the background reflecting the same place I viewed it from.

We both looked at it worryingly.

Still, she held the Polaroid proudly in the Glasgow sun. It was, after all, her creation, and she enjoyed using the camera at various points, even if we were both forcibly precious about it due to the expense of its film stock and its limited number of exposures.

Our weekend continued, quietly but perfectly reasonably, carrying the unusually eerie photo around until, after some drinks around Trongate, we got the train back to Dumfries.

The fact that the Polaroid travelled with us cannot be underestimated in regards to its effect: it witnessed moments that our friends and relatives only heard about through remembrance, if told at all. There were things contained within it. Instant photography gifts all those who witness its creation with a perception usually only reserved for photographers. The Polaroid is like a USB stick of extra memory that you plug in when you want to remember things more deeply.

We would not break up for several months, though certainly the distance that was between us emotionally lingered until both of us needed, quite amicably, to fill our silence with other people and places. Something was wrong even then, however, and, in hindsight, the 35mm had caught it too but in a different and much longer way round to the Polaroid.

I had almost destroyed the 35mm photo when sat on the grass. Fiddling with the awkward mechanism of the camera, its spiky turner doing its best to injure my fingers, I had slipped the box open and exposed the reel. Most of the other photos of the park were ruined. But the one of my partner had only been partly destroyed, marked by an uncompromising black block.

I looked at it later and saw nothing less than a definite end to our relationship, a finishing line marked in black celluloid created by own clumsiness. How appropriate. It might as well have been a black dog that sat with us that day on Glasgow Green rather than the abstract black block, a distortion which suggests we had camped out for a lunch by the obelisk from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than the River Clyde.

The metaphor does not need stretching further. We broke up and the photographs had foretold it, or at least had mapped it, simply in different ways. This is always a tricky relationship to interpret when looking at any photos, of course; uncanny foresight or self-fulfilling prophecy, naïve projection or sheer coincidence?

The point in sharing this pair is that they highlight the difference in destinations between the two forms of photography. The Polaroid was brutally there in the moment. Its metaphysical ‘there-ness’ was like an alarm bell ringing. The 35mm, on the other hand, required a more convoluted destination to be understood, its eventual printing being the equivalent destination to the finished Polaroid.

So when does a photograph become a photograph? For the Polaroid, that answer is simple. For every other form, that question, while assumed to be the same in a great deal of photographic writing, is decidedly more complicated.

Undeveloped 35mm is like a musical score waiting to be played, and even the developed negatives still have a sense of not being fully finished. It is something else before development; something that certainly has none of the presence of a Polaroid and only an abstract existence.

Jean Baudrillard, another awkward post-structalist, wrote that every object photographed is ‘merely the trace left by the disappearance of everything else.’ Relationships, I find after excavating these two photos, are inevitably included in this summation.

With immediacy in mind, it could be argued that the destination of a digital photo is closer to that of the Polaroid. What would the reading of those two photographs have been if taken on our (then low quality) phones or on a digital camera? If 35mm photos must avoid the moment, it at least physically exists on some level eventually, even if still not the finished object before being printed.

This is more than can be said for a digital photograph.

Part 3 coming soon.