Polaroid-ization

Facebook is a terrible and soul-wrenching time (and mind) suck – this we all know to be true. But indulge once in a while, with your social anthropologist’s hat on (mine is a Holmes-style deerstalker), and you can unearth some pretty interesting cultural trends amongst ‘friends’ and networks. [In fact, dear Facebook: instead of surreptitiously selling my data to advertisers and partner websites, why not give me more power to accumulate data and analytics on my own friends and network? Oh the creative things I could do with this information!...but I digress...]

One phenomena I have observed in my mini-feed lately is the plethora of Polaroid-style, sepia colored photographs proudly and artistically uploaded and shared by friends. This nostalgic photographic craze seems to parallel the rise of the camera-enabled smart phone, and in particular the iPhone. A popular iPhone app converts pictures taken with the phone’s camera into retro-style Polaroids. Here are some examples:

It’s not just smart-phone power users and geeky photographers who are adapting this aesthetic. Polaroid-ization has gone mainstream across many media types – for example, check out the newest music video from the indie pop band 'The Girls', who adapt the aesthetic to film. Major retailer J.Crew is currently featuring a Polaroid-inspired motif on their homepage. Polaroid, the company that actually started it all and incidentally filed for bankruptcy in 2001, recently launched a slick new website and is partnering with Lady Gaga to be their new ‘Creative Director and Brand Ambassador’.

If Lady Gaga is on-board, you know something very apropos is going on here.

So, as usual, this all begs the question – what does it mean? Why this incessant interest in reverting back to lo-tech – not just with photography, but also more broadly as an aesthetic? And, perhaps even more interestingly, what does it mean that we are creating and romanticizing this lo-tech, 'pure' aesthetic with high-tech digital devices?

To me, the rise of the Polaroid represents society’s current ambivalence towards the ascendancy of digital technology in the media space. It seems that almost all media we consume these days is digital or virtual, from photography to books to online video, even birthday invitations (evite, anyone?). We consume this media on our computers, ipads, kindles, ipods, smart phones….and so on. No doubt digitalization allows us to consume a lot of media very quickly, and also allows for very broad access - all very good things. But there is something important about holding a photograph in your hand, or experiencing the colors of a painting in person, or reading the words off a crisp white page that you can turn, mark, smell. Perhaps what digitalization is lacking is a sense of physical intimacy with images - experiencing an image with our complete range of senses and not just through an artificial, pixel-ated window. Our need for this intimacy could explain the rise of the Polaroid, in all its grainy, imperfect, physical glory. However, the sentiment and urge is not strong enough to drive us to actually revert back to the original low-tech devices with which these images were created - we want images and aesthetics that celebrate lo-tech authenticity, but are not willing to sacrifice the convenience, speed, or mass access of high-tech.

The tension between the benefits of digitalization (ease, speed, access) and its costs (a loss of authenticity and visual intimacy) will continue to build as technology advances - Polaroid-ization is just one example of a collective response to that tension. I’m sure we will see more, similar responses.

Keep your eyes on your mini-feed…