Instant consternation
End of Polaroid film leaves many in lurch
As coroner of Cayuga County in New York, James Dolan has seen many an untimely death. He documents each of them with snapshots from a Polaroid camera.
But Polaroid Corp.'s instant film business is doomed, a victim of the public's taste for digital photography. And this is one death Dolan is finding hard to handle.
Instant pictures provide immediate evidence that cannot be altered and require far less equipment to produce than digital images, which can be difficult to send in rural areas.
"How do you transmit a digital picture?" asked Dolan, whose county includes areas with poor cellphone and radio reception. "We could be 60 miles from my office, and we have to take a picture of a car accident or a farm accident or a gunshot wound," he said. "You're a good distance from a computer hookup."
So Dolan shoots Polaroids, slips them into an envelope, and ships them to the medical examiner along with the corpse. But with Polaroid's announcement this month that it is halting production of instant film, Dolan and thousands of others are forced to hunt for alternatives.
Polaroid sold thousands of cameras to police organizations during its heyday; the Massachusetts company had a separate business unit devoted to law enforcement photography.
It also makes large film sheets for giant cameras used by portrait and landscape photographers, and fine-grained, black-and-white films used by scientists to capture images from their electron microscopes.
But it was millions of ordinary consumers who for 60 years paid the bills at Polaroid. Those consumers are toting digital cameras now, Polaroid is leaving the instant-picture business, and the specialty customers are left to wonder where their next pack of Polaroid film is coming from.
"Polaroid pretty much has left us in a bind," said Harry Shmunes, chief operating officer of Dixie Sales in Jacksonville, Fla., which has been selling Polaroid products since 1974. Dixie Sales has long-term contracts to supply Polaroid film to police departments throughout the United States. Shmunes was angry that Dixie received so little notice about the shutdown because his company could be sued if it cannot deliver the goods. "We feel a little bit betrayed by them," he said.
Instant film was the brainchild of Polaroid's founder, Edwin Land, who started working on the idea in 1943 when his company was an obscure maker of optical equipment for the US military.
In 1947, with World War II over and government contracts drying up, Land rushed his instant camera into production, with spectacular success. Consumers bought millions of Polaroid cameras and hundreds of millions of Polaroid film packs, establishing the company as one of Massachusetts' biggest manufacturers, with as many as 15,000 employees, and revenue that peaked at $2.31 billion in 1994.
According to the Photo Marketing Association, Americans bought 4.2 million instant cameras in 2000, nearly all of them Polaroids. However, they bought 4.5 million digital cameras that same year. It was a harbinger of hard times for Polaroid; digital cameras steadily got cheaper and better, and users became accustomed to sharing snapshots over the Internet. Last year, Americans bought 28.2 million digital cameras, and just 240,000 instant cameras.
Polaroid had other problems: Its successful fight against a hostile takeover bid in the late 1980s left the company swamped with debt. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, and is now owned by privately-held Petters Group Worldwide, of Minnetonka, Minn. Petters sells digital cameras, flat-panel TV sets, and computer monitors under the Polaroid brand.
The company's abandonment of film dismayed photo buffs worldwide, but few were ordinary consumers. Instead, hobbyists and specialists are most upset.
Suzanne Revy of Groton is a former photo editor at US News & World Report magazine who now does portrait photography. She also does still-life photos of flowers using a large tripod-mounted camera and Polaroid Type 56 black-and-white film. Type 56 produces images with a slightly brownish hue that Revy admires. Indeed, Revy said that all Polaroid photos have their own look.
"There is just a rich kind of quality to them that is unique in photography," she said. "There is no other product that does what these photos do."
Revy has no interest in switching to digital gear. "There's something too homogenous about the look of digital image capture that doesn't do it for me," she said. Instead she will buy up whatever Polaroid film she can find, and make it last as long as possible.
But that's not much of an alternative, said Jason Brunner, a photographer and cinematographer in Salt Lake City. "The Polaroid, unfortunately, does not keep like other films," Brunner said. "You can't freeze it, like other films, because of the chemical pods" that enable the film to develop an image. "After a couple of years, it really starts to deteriorate."
Brunner shoots Polaroid Type 55 film, which unlike most other Polaroid films produces a negative that lets the user make many copies of the photo. "I shoot it primarily for the negatives," Brunner said. "I can't make a real print out of a digital file."
Still, Brunner has resigned himself to the inevitable. "I guess I'll just be using other films," he said.
While Polaroid is giving up on instant film, Fujifilm plans to continue production for now.
"We have no plans at this point to phase out," said Christian Fridholm, Fujifilm's director of marketing for picture-taking. Indeed, Fridholm said, Fujifilm has seen a surge of inquiries about its instant-film products. "Our 800 number's been deluged," he said.
In the United States, Fujifilm sells four film types, two color and two black-and-white. Each fits into existing Polaroid cameras. But these Fujifilm products are modeled after the old-style Polaroid films, which require the user to peel away the photo from an envelope full of developing chemicals. In the 1970s, Polaroid introduced the SX-70 "integral" system. The picture slid out of the camera in a single piece, with no extra material to peel off and discard - a process that could ruin a picture if you peeled it open too quickly.
Fujifilm makes an integral film, but it works only in Fujifilm's own camera, the Instax.
Officially, Fujifilm does not sell the Instax in the United States, but it is available from some dealers, including Dixie Sales, which Shmunes said has already received orders from law enforcement agencies.
"We're hoping that Instax will be able to carry us," Shmunes said.
Many law enforcement agencies have already made the transition to digital photography. Boston's crime scene investigators use digital cameras; so do those of the Massachusetts State Police. But other police forces remain wedded to Polaroid technology.
"A lot of sections use it throughout the department," said Officer Hawley Spencer of the Philadelphia police. "Our detective division uses it, special victims section uses it, domestic violence."
The cameras are even used by the parking detail to photograph illegally parked cars before they are towed, to prove they weren't damaged by the city.
Spencer said many officers lack experience with traditional film cameras and digital cameras. They're often worried that they might botch vital photos of a crime scene.
"When you shoot a Polaroid you know you've got it," Spencer said. "You pull it out; if it's not good, you shoot it again."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 