Less Volume, More Meaning
The Polaroid I-2 camera from Polaroid (image: Fabian Frinzel).
When Polaroid launched its first SLR instant camera in 1972, its appeal was clear. “It started out being the most instant way to create and hold a photograph in your hands,” says the company’s CEO Oskar Smolokowski. “It was weeks faster than the standard way people experienced photography back then.”
Today, not so much. The rise of smartphone cameras wiped out the USP of instant cameras almost overnight, leaving the technology in search for a raison d’être. “Over the last 15 years, smartphone photography took the throne for the ‘most instant’ experience,” Smolokowski explains. “Not only do you get to look at your photo within the same second after taking it, you can share it with millions of people (if they care to look at it) within the same minute.”
Not that Polaroid was around for this change. The original company went bankrupt in 2001 after a series of poor business decisions, and it was only the painstaking work of Smolokowski and his Impossible Project – which from 2008 manufactured film for old Polaroid cameras – that enabled the company to relaunch under his leadership in 2017. In the intervening period, however, “the instant photography experience [had] changed in relation to the world around it,” Smolokowski says. “We [were] no longer the most instant way to create and hold a photograph, but we became one of the most meaningful.” An instant camera, he adds, has instead become “something you reach for more rarely in the world of photography, but very deliberately”.
This ethos is in full effect in the I-2, a new camera from Polaroid and the company’s first to have inbuilt manual controls. Compared with Polaroid’s other cameras, the I-2 is intended as a tool for those who treat analogue photography as an art form, be they professionals or keen amateurs. It is a camera whose design flags its seriousness by emphasising the lens front and centre. “I tend to believe that the best design is as honest as possible,” says Smolokowski, “[and] the design we arrived at in the end is extremely honest – the lens is the absolute centre of this new camera.”
Whereas instant photography carries connotations of the cheap and cheerful point-and-click, the I-2 is a premium product that rewards experimentation through its various settings – an approach in which Smolokowski sees the medium’s future. “The sea of digital photographs and videos we create on our phones means they become less meaningful and less likely to be experienced beyond the moment of creation or instant sharing,” he says. “The few you bring into the real world with your Polaroid camera will live with you in the physical world; in your environment, not behind glass.”
The instantaneousness of instant photography may have been overtaken by digital, but the physicality of the medium remains. The I-2 is an unashamedly material object, with its aluminium lens barrel, cherry-red shutter button, and black plastic casing, and the images that eject from its outer shell are just the same. “You create less Polaroid photos and put more effort inside each one – that’s where the meaning comes from,” says Smolokowski. “You can’t edit them the way you can add a filter on a digital photo, or use AI to create a fake beautiful situation – that’s the honesty and imperfection.”
Words George Isleden
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.