Instant karma

Indeed, one girl took out a tiny Canon PowerShot digital camera, then another guest produced . . . a Polaroid One600 Classic instant film camera. Huh? “It’s pretty cool,’’ she said. “You get the picture immediately.’’ Her neighbor in her freshman dorm was using one, too.

It was a similar comment by a young woman that created instant photography 65 years ago. The young inventor Edwin Land was vacationing with his family in Santa Fe during World War II and took a snapshot of his daughter, Jennifer. “Why can’t I see it now?’’ she asked. Why not, indeed?

The rise and fall of Polaroid Corp. and its wondrous technology is one of the great business stories of the 20th century. Polaroid was the Google of its time: the hot stock, the place the smart people wanted to work, headquartered in the most socially and technologically progressive city in the country. Cambridge, if you can believe it.

Polaroid’s ruin was complete and spectacular. The Globe and many other publications chronicled its grisly extinction, shuttered factory by shuttered factory, massive layoff by massive layoff. The slow-moving tsunami of digital photography wiped Polaroid from the map. Seven or eight years ago, I proposed a short biography of Land to an editor who was commissioning books about American entrepreneurs. The turn-down was gentle: “Thank you, Alex, but no one has any idea who this man is.’’

Now the strangest thing is happening. Like vinyl records, the Polaroid photograph is enjoying a modest comeback. Whether it succeeds is anyone’s guess. What’s driving the resurgence, in part, are the distinctive and inimitable qualities of the Polaroid color palette. “The color fields looks less like photographs and more like paintings,’’ says Grant Hamilton, an Iowa-based photographer who works extensively with an SX-70 Alpha One that he bought on e-Bay for $30.

But can’t everything be done digitally? “Polaroid is the only medium I’m aware of where the chemical image is squeezed from the camera and painted on the film,’’ Hamilton says. “If I were to use a digital camera, the images would be really uniform, really perfect. For me, Polaroid provides an important set of constraints that ultimately create the final product.’’

The other allure is genuine instant photography. Yes, you can see digital pictures immediately, but holding them and passing them around is another thing. I use various Internet services to make digital prints, but I don’t receive them for a week or more. Printing at home looks easy in the Hewlett-Packard ads, less so in reality.

There are millions of Polaroid cameras in the world, and thousands more for sale on the Internet. A company called Polapremium bought 500,000 film packs after Polaroid left the business last year, and sells them for about $20 a piece - that’s $2 per picture - from its website. “Our market is not the mass market that Polaroid had,’’ admits Dave Bias, who handles US sales. And there is a problem: The film supply is slowly dwindling.

At least two companies believe there is life left in the defunct brand. In Holland, a small band of technologists, entrepreneurs, and photography geeks who call themselves the Impossible Project - the name derives from a famous Edwin Land quote, “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible’’ - bought a Polaroid film factory on the day it was to be closed, and are trying to get production back on its feet. They hope to be producing new film packs within a few months.

Someone else has their eye on the Polaroid franchise - Polaroid itself. A Boston-based company, Gordon Brothers, owns the Polaroid name and patents with a Canadian partner, and they are planning to relaunch some products, maybe a camera and definitely some film. “There is clearly still a following,’’ says Gordon’s president, Stephen Miller. “The balance sheet was broken, but the brand wasn’t,’’ he continues. “This is one of only four or five brands that has 100 percent awareness, like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. People around the world want to see us succeed.’’

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.