polaroid

Exhibition Explores Racism in Early Color Photography

One would hope that the medium of photography was immune to racial prejudice, but an exhibit by London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin shows that this was not always the case. The artists' exhibit, on display at Johannesburg's Goodman Gallery, explores the marks that racism left on early color photography.

Using film designed to capture white faces and a camera that became infamous for helping further apartheid in South Africa, Broomberg and Chanarin took photos of beautiful South African flora -- putting the once-racial implements to better use.

Photographer Took One Photo Every Day for Eighteen Years

Jamie Livingston isn't a household name. And even though he has his own Wikipedia entry and has had his story told many times over the years, it's as moving today as ever. Jamie was a New York-based photographer, film maker and circus performer who became famous by taking one polaroid picture every day for the last eighteen years of his life.

Polaroid-Shaped Printer Encourages You to Photograph Your Online Adventures

Here's an interesting idea/experiment put together by Adrià Navarro and DI Shin that takes photographing your daily life to a whole new level. Fair warning, if you think that taking pictures of your breakfast or your night out bowling is overkill, you should probably stop reading now...

The Polaroid Cacher is a wireless printer housed inside a Polaroid Land Camera case, and its sole purpose is to take pictures of your daily online adventures.

Polaroid Unleashes the Android-Powered iM1836

After a substantial leak in mid-December, we expected that Polaroid would unveil its android-powered J2 (or is it J3 now?) look-alike at CES. And here it is, officially announced in all its pre-production glory alongside a few other, less-impressive products.

Polaroid to Open “Fotobars” for Printing and Editing Smartphone Photos

Given the digital age, you'd think that companies would shy away from brick-and-mortar stores. But the lo-fi movement has been good to the instant photography giant, and so in addition to releasing a mirrorless camera later this year, Polaroid has decided to open up a chain of retail stores called "Fotobars." The hope is that people will come to these stores and print the photos that have been lost somewhere in the zeros and ones of their digital devices.

Polaroid Jacket Lets You Wear What the Company’s Factory Workers Wore

After Polaroid film died off, the The Impossible Project spent years rebooting the factories and breathing new life into old lines of instant film. However, the white-bordered film isn't the only thing Impossible has brought back from the dead. The company has also recreated Polaroid fashion from decades ago, launching the Polaroid Classic Factory Jacket.

Shooting with a Polaroid 600 and an Off-Camera Flash

It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was time to start pushing the envelope.

An idea hit me one day, and I knew I had to try something that I’ve never seen done before: shooting off camera flash with an older Polaroid 600 instant camera.

Photographs Documenting the Demise of Camera Film Companies

Since 2005, photographer and photography lecturer Robert Burley has been documenting the demise of film photography through film photographs. He has traveled around the world with his 4x5 field camera in tow, capturing the demolition of buildings, the equipment that once powered a giant industry, and the desolation of factories that were once teeming with workers.

The photograph above shows a crowd watching the implosions of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York on October 6, 2007.

Beautiful Homemade Polaroid Twin-Lens Reflex Camera Made of Wood

Feast your eyes on this gorgeous twin-lens reflex camera that was designed and built from scratch by photographer Kevin Kadooka, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Portland. It uses a Mamiya-Sekor 105mm f/3.5 Chrome lens and has a Polaroid back for shooting 4.25x3.5-inch instant film, and is crafted out of laser-cut birch plywood.

Turn Your Instagram Photographs Into a Beautiful Tear-Off Calendar

Last year, we wrote about Poladarium, a tear-off calendar that inspires you with a new Polaroid picture every day. Now, for roughly the same price, you can create one that features your own photographs. Instagram printing company Printstagram has launched a new calendar product that allows you to turn your Instagram photo stream into a beautiful stack of 365 8.5x7cm "Polaroid" pictures.

Surreal Composites Created by Arranging Individual Instant Photos

Since 2006, Brooklyn-based artist Patrick Winfield has been creating incredible photo collages by photographing and recreating scenes using a large number of individual instant photo prints. Some of his pieces are composed by more than over one hundred instant photos! Although his work mostly featured Polaroid films early on, Winfield branched out into other types as well (e.g. The Impossible Project instant films) after Polaroid bowed out of the industry.

Polaroid Once Won an Epic Courtroom Battle with Kodak

Here's an interesting piece of photo trivia for today: did you know that Apple's similarities with Kodak don't end with Steve Jobs modeling his career and his company after Polaroid? The ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung is strikingly similar to the battle Polaroid had with Kodak many decades ago.

Impossible Instant Lab Turns Your iPhone Photos Into Real Polaroid Pictures

Now that The Impossible Project has succeeded in reviving Polaroid-style instant films -- even giant ones -- the company is expanding its horizons and branching out to new products. Today, it announced a crazy new device that's dedicated to turning your digital iPhone photos into analog instant photo prints: the Impossible Instant Lab.

Shooting with the First Lot of Impossible’s New 8×10 Large Format Instant Film

San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani, the guy who shot giant Polaroid photos of famous photographers holding their works, recently got his hands on Lot #1 of The Impossible Project's new 8x10 instant film. To test it out, Mantoani busted out his large format camera and 8x10 processor, and then visited a local surf shop to create a multi-shot panorama.

Portraits of Lost Olympic Tourists

The subjects in portrait projects are often selected for something they all have in common. The people seen in Brooklyn-based photographer Caroll Taveras' project You Are Here have this in common: they were lost at the Olympics. Commissioned by Mother London, Taveras finds tourists at the Olympic games who are hopelessly lost, and then guides them to their desired destinations in exchange for a portrait.

How to Make a DIY Polaroid Pop-Up Card

As you already know, we're pretty obsessed with Polaroids, and all the creative photography we can get our hands on. This tutorial will teach you how to make a pop-up Polaroid camera card that "prints" out a miniature Polaroid picture.

The pieces of card stock for this project are about 7-1/2 inches long by 4-1/2 inches wide. To create a mini Polaroid you can print, we recommend using the Shake It Photo iPhone app. Send the image from your phone to your email, drop it into Preview, Photoshop or Word to resize, and you're good to go.

Handmade Wooden Frames for Polaroid Pictures

Polaroid pictures might have an iconic look, but finding an elegant frame for them requires more than a trip to your nearest department store. Swiss design group Refurnished has a beautiful "Polaroid SX70 frame" that protects your white-bordered pictures inside a handmade wooden case.

Polaroid Z2300: Instant Photos in a Point-and-Shoot Body

Polaroid lovers will be happy to know that it doesn't look like the company is slowing down where the instant camera game is concerned. Late last year they unveiled the Z340 -- a futuristic digital instant camera in the classic Polaroid style -- and now they've officially announced their newer, sleeker Z2300. The Z2300 falls somewhere in-between Polaroid's big and bulky Z340 and the dinky (and somewhat unwieldy) PIC-300. In many ways it combines the best of both worlds in to a much more stylish point-and-shoot package.

Frankenlens: A Polaroid Fused with a Micro Four Thirds Camera

Here's an interesting project that photographer Gabriel Verdugo Soto put together this last weekend by slapping together an old polaroid lens/aperture mechanism and a micro four thirds camera. In order to keep the lens in focus, he measured the distance from the lens to the polaroid paper in the orignal camera and used macro tubes to ensure the same distance was maintained between the lens and the sensor. The whole thing was then attached to a 52mm ring, and held together using that white epoxy clay you see in the pictures.

Teen Finds Photo of His Long-Dead Uncle in a $1 Garage Sale Camera

Last Thursday, 13-year-old Addison Logan of Wichita, Kansas found something really cool at a garage sale: an old Polaroid camera for only $1 (score!). But when Addison got it home and started looking up how to use it on the internet, what he found in the cartridge was even cooler, or maybe creepier. Inside the Polaroid camera, bought from a family they don't even know, was a picture of his uncle Scott who died some 23 years ago in a car accident:

Polaroid Pictures Recreated with Thread

The Portrait Project is a series of 10 stitched portraits by London-based artist Evelin Kasikov. Each portrait is created with an actual Polaroid picture as the starting point, and is based on the same grid. The idea is similar to pointillism, but instead of dots she uses squares, crosses, and lines of different colors and weights. 10-15 feet of cotton thread does into each piece, and stitching them takes between two days and a week to complete.

Instagram Socialmatic: A Concept Design for a Physical Instagram Camera

A week ago we shared a funny "leaked advertisement" for a fictional camera called the Instagram Snap. The video poked fun at the possibility that Instagram would use their $1 billion buyout from Facebook to build a ridiculous "real-world" camera -- basically a Polaroid camera with "sharing" features (passing a photo to another person by hand) and "filters" (coffee filter = spill coffee on your picture). Ironically enough though, a concept of just such a camera has recently come out, and it actually seems somewhat appealing.

Polaroid Land Camera Advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid sponsored shows like "The Tonight Show" during which the hosts would take time to endorse the cameras during the show itself rather than cut to commercials. The montage above takes viewers back to a time when fancy new Polaroid cameras cost $69.95 -- or $1.19 a week.

The Impossible Project’s COOL Instant Film Takes a Cue from Coors Beer

You wouldn't think the world of instant film could learn much from the world of beer -- and on most counts you'd be right -- but in this particular case, a little bit of Coors inspiration may have played a role in The Impossible Projects new line of COOL Polaroid films. The specialty instant film, part of The Impossible Project's Spring 2012 line, are kept in a temperature-sensitive package. In order to maintain its shelf life, the packaging will warn you when you're storing it in too warm an environment by displaying the message "Keep Me Cool."

Tape Transfer Portraits Show Subjects Behind Their Own Altered Photos

Photographer Rory White's Rorshak Tape Transfer Series might look like some kind of surreal digital art, but the images were actually created without Photoshop. White shot portraits of his subjects, printed them out, and invited the subjects to paint, tear, and alter the prints. He then covered the image with packing tape, dropped it in hot water, and peeled off the paper on the back (like a Polaroid emulsion transfer). The semi-transparent image would then be hung from a stand, and the subject rephotographed while standing behind it.