Students freeze-frame a dying art

Author: Emma Stanford

On Tuesday, an exhibit at Gifford's Gamut Room celebrated the dying art of Polaroid photography. "R.I.P. Polaroid," part of the Gamut Room's week-long Spring Awakening festival, used the work of student photographers to pay tribute to the famous brand of instant film, now fast becoming extinct.

Polaroid, Inc. stopped producing instant film last year, causing "an outcry in the small but dedicated Polaroid photography community," according to Gamut Room Co-manager Emmeline Cardozo '09. She and the other Gamut Room organizers decided to give Middlebury photographers an opportunity for a final exploration of the powers and limitations of instant film. Each participating student bought a roll of Polaroid film from the Gamut Room for $5 and turned in ten photographs, including one self-portrait, for Tuesday's exhibit.

The results were clustered on the walls of the Gamut Room. Their scattered arrangement and the atmosphere of coffee and bean-bag chairs reinforced the essential spontaneity of instant film. While the photographers chose varied subjects, from a handprint on a frosty window to a series of Lake Champlain fishing huts, they shared an appreciation of Polaroid film.

"Unlike digital photos, there's only one, and it's just so special and unique," Jack Reed '10 said of Polaroid photos. Reed has made a long-time hobby of Polaroid. When film production stopped, he started buying it on eBay, but the increasing demand drove prices up to as much as $18 for ten exposures. The Gamut Room's subsidized film offered more freedom.

The variance and unpredictability of Polaroid photography makes it exciting, Reed said. His photos of fishing huts on Lake Champlain illustrate his point. He saw the huts at the end of a long road trip and decided to photograph them, but he didn't take the weather into account. The cold slowed the photos' development and gave them a slightly bluish tinge.

"I had to put them under my coat to help them develop," Reed said.

Another photographer, Taryn Tilton '11, learned about "R.I.P. Polaroid" by email. She had already done a lot of Polaroid photography, she said, "so I tried to think of the strangest thing I could do, and all I could think of was bathrooms." The result was a series of ten photographs of herself and her friends in various bathrooms on campus, posed goofily and grinning at the camera.

Tilton, like many advocates of Polaroid film, is worried that the spontaneous, natural quality of Polaroid will be lost in the modern era of digital retouching. Polaroid's power lies in the fact that each photograph, once taken, is permanent.

"It's this tangible thing that comes out," said Tilton. "Sometimes there's mistakes, but there are no do-overs, so you learn to love it."

Still, the Polaroid community is not giving up on instant film. Save Polaroid, at savepolaroid.com, offers petitions, advice on procuring Polaroid film, and lists such as "Ten Ways to Love Polaroid Before It's Too Late." Another group, The Impossible Project, plans to reopen the Polaroid factory and redesign instant film as a viable 21st-century product.

If these initiatives succeed, "R.I.P. Polaroid's" name will seem unnecessarily pessimistic. But the exhibit still serves, if not as a eulogy, then as a celebration of the unique qualities of Polaroid photography.

"R.I.P. Polaroid" will be on exhibit in the Gamut Room until the end of the month. The Gamut room is open Sunday thru Thursday, 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.