A darkroom inside the camera

A remarkable mid-century invention allowed a photographer to produce pictures almost immediately, a bit of magic that is rarely matched even by current digital cameras.

Our photographer writes:
In an amusing video, several digital-age children are introduced to film cameras–devices they’d never seen before.  They were told that, after taking pictures, they’d have to take the film somewhere to be developed and printed, which would take at least an hour.  This staggered them.  “What am I going to do for a whole hour?” one wailed.  And of course we remember that hour as being a very short time for film.  But there was–is–a kind of analog imager that produced a picture in just a minute: the Polaroid Land camera.  One example has just arrived in the Five Colors collection.

This is a Polaroid Land Automatic 100, dating from the mid-1960s (as is clear from the hairstyles in the owner’s manual).  You take the picture with it in very much the same way as other cameras, adjusting focus and exposure and then pressing the shutter.  Then the real magic starts.  When you pull out of the side a strange-looking card, the picture inside automatically starts developing.  After a minute or so you peel it apart and in your hand is a photograph.  To anyone who knows what kind of alchemy needs to happen in order to produce a film picture, this is still amazing.  What normally takes hours inside a darkroom happens in your hand, in a minute.  (A later version is even simpler and more magical: you don’t even need to time and peel, and the picture appears as you watch.)

There are drawbacks, of course.  The camera is larger than its relatives, and the picture is smaller than enlargements you can make in the darkroom (though, interestingly, it’s about the size of a smartphone screen).  And there’s only one copy.  So it did not replace the more conventional film camera in most roles.  It did, however, carve a respectable niche for itself, even beyond the mundane tasks (like pictures for picture ID cards) for which it was uniquely suited.

And, surprisingly, it’s still possible to get instant film.  Polaroid stopped making it long ago, but Fujifilm made compatible film packs for this model until very recently, so we’ve been able to get some instant pictures of things around the Five Colors headquarters.  And the last type, the kind that develops as you watch without any action on your part, is still in production.

In the video I mentioned at the start, all the kids much preferred digital cameras to film–except one.  He pointed out that people almost never have physical prints of the pictures they take: they only exist in the phone or on the computer.  He preferred film because it always gave you something to hold in your hand.  The Polaroid Land cameras allow you to have the best of both sides: you get your physical picture (almost) instantly.