Polaroid announced this month that it is stopping production of instant film and the cameras that use it, closing the factories, and moving what remains of the company toward licensing its name onto other people’s digital products. The company that invented the idea of a photograph you could hold within a minute of taking it is exiting the business of making that photograph.
Nobody should be surprised. Digital cameras solved the problem instant film was invented to solve- seeing the picture immediately- and solved it more completely: no film to buy, no wasted shots, a screen that shows you the result before you have even put the camera down.
What digital never quite replicated is the object. A Polaroid print is a specific physical thing, developing in front of you over a couple of minutes, slightly imperfect, existing in exactly one copy unless somebody scans it. A digital photograph is a file, infinitely copyable, existing nowhere in particular until you choose to print it, which almost nobody with a digital camera actually does with any regularity.
That difference sounds sentimental, and I think it is more than that. A print you can only make once and cannot delete changes how you take the photograph. You commit to the moment instead of shooting six frames and keeping the best one. The format built in a discipline that convenience quietly removed, and I am not sure convenience was a fair trade in every case, even if it was the right trade for almost every use.
The economics never allowed a second act. Instant film requires a real factory making a genuinely complicated chemical product at a scale that only worked when tens of millions of people had no other option. Once a smaller, shrinking population wants it, unit costs stop making sense long before the company runs out of people who would still buy it.
What survives, I think, is the idea rather than the format. Somebody will eventually build a digital camera with a built-in printer that spits out a small physical image on the spot, chasing the same instant-object appeal with none of the chemistry. It will not smell like a darkroom, and it will not develop in your hand while you watch, and it will probably sell reasonably well anyway, because the appeal was never really the chemistry. It was the wait, and the singular object at the end of it.