OMG: The Last Polaroid Film is at Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters is frustrating for many reasons: the company’s ultra-conservative President, their alleged idea-stealing (see here and here), their general exploitation of DIY culture, this jumper. For awhile, I very deliberately avoided buying anything from there, but for no good reason I now occasionally patronize the store and website (hey, they patronize me, I’m just returning the favor), though pretty much only when things go on sale and I can feel like I’m putting one over on someone. Sigh: excuses, excuses.

Anyway, I went to the store on Second Avenue yesterday to make a very deliberate purchase. It was not leggings or a cute hat or a jewelry stand shaped like a bird. It was something arguably slightly more useful: Polaroid film.

Awhile back, it wouldn’t have been worth noting that the store is stocking this particular cult photography product. The company long ago figured out the benefits of appealing to the hipster aesthetic, whether through pre-made decorations for your “apartment” (never your “house”…they are so in touch with your reality) or supplies to help you become the cool artist/crafter/DJ of your dreams (screen printing kits, sewing machines, something called a “professional stud setter”). Photography made particular sense: everyone knows hipsters love to take pictures of their friends and their favorite bands and everyone’s silly outfits, and they tend to have some money to burn, even if they don’t want to talk about it. And so for awhile, Urban Outfitters has been a reliable (if irritating) supplier of Lomographic cameras, Holgas, and various related supplies that allow you to capture that impulsive, bathed-in-a-wistful-glow look.

Polaroid film, though, is no longer being made: many of the necessary component parts aren’t available anymore, and the last production run was in 2008. Whatever’s left on the market is all there is. The film was never inexpensive, but now—if you’re lucky—you’ll pay upwards of twenty bucks for a pack of ten exposures. Polaroid fanatics, of which there are many, have been frantically buying up the remaining stock, to use in cameras that also aren’t made anymore.

Enter The Impossible Project, a quixotically named effort to “re-start production of analog instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010.” The Project negotiated with Polaroid to acquire all their old production equipment, signed a ten-year lease on the Netherlands factory building, and is working to “develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimised components, produced with a streamlined modern setup,” though “NOT to re-build Polaroid Integral film.” The result will be “an innovative and fresh analog material,” but I assume it’ll look and feel much like the Polaroid film of yore. On the production side, it’s obviously a very techie endeavor (the website asks for support in developing “the latex timing layer”), driven by an impressive team of engineers, chemists and various specialists.

A lot has been written about what makes Polaroid images so special. My Last Polaroid—a project aimed at collecting people’s melancholy final exposures—claims, “If you could take a picture of a memory, it would be a Polaroid.” This rings true, even though it’s hyperbolic in the way that most Polaroid tributes are (and there are many). Losing Polaroids means losing a way of looking at and framing the world. Polaroid-lovers find themselves in moments and places where they look around and think, I want to capture this in a Polaroid. That has less to do with the quality of the particular experience than with the way they anticipate wanting to remember it. Digital photography creates instant memories, too, but Polaroid puts that memory in our hands as it’s own object, set apart from the muddle on a comparatively boundless memory card. It lets us see, while we’re standing in the same place, what the place and time will look like in retrospect. That whole idea has a certain sadness to it, a feeling of authenticity that can be coaxed on demand.

It’s the style in which many Urban Outfitters catalogs are shot these days, all hazy light and far-off expressions, intended to give tattered leotards and heinous harem pants some gravitas. So it’s not surprising that the company has partnered with The Impossible Project, offering a very limited number of the last Polaroid camera ever produced, and a fair amount of Type 779 Instant Film from the last production runs, “hand-selected, tested, and stored at low temperatures exclusively for Urban Outfitters.” The film is $24 a pack—obviously pricey, but it could be a lot worse. After deciding to buy two, I bought three. The cute scarf-wearing hipster boy behind the register smiled and said how great he thought it was that they had the film; he’d bought several packs himself.

The death and possible rebirth of Polaroid film is probably a more genuine—and surely more saleable—cause for Urban Outfitters to promote than any number of less tangible (and less convincing) environmental or social justice problems. And I’m not saying they need to choose between them; I get uncomfortable when people act shocked that money is being spent on, say, the High Line when the city is full of people who can’t afford to feed themselves. Where people’s money and attention goes is part of a complicated balance: its true that there’s only so much of both, but still, Polaroid fever doesn’t mean there isn’t still room to promote other noble efforts.

Regardless, The Impossible Project is really a perfect pitch for Urban Outfitters’ audience of cool kids and sometime artists. Since using their power for good is something to be skeptical of when it comes to this particular chain (remember those “Voting is for Old People” t-shirts?), it’s kind of a relief to see them promoting something that doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. Of course, people are still getting cranky: my favorite is a poster on a self-described “Williamsburg hipster messageboard” who moans, “what a fucking waste…i do not think anyone will buy a polaroid at UO and do anything meaningful with it.”) Boo hoo.

Still, it’s a little weird to see so much effort being put into the revival of something so small and ultimately symbolic. There are people whose job it now is to expend serious resources remake a product, or a medium, because they and others have a personal attachment to it. “I need a world where people still need Polaroids,” explains The Impossible Project’s Dave Bias on his personal website. “No Photoshop filter or expertly manipulated pixel will ever be able to match the simple magic of holding a picture in your hand and watching the chemical process resolve itself before your eyes.” I empathize, I buy my share of the film, I’m excited to use it. And yet I cringe.

Emotional attachment justifies a product’s marketability—nothing new there—and once again, nostalgia is a selling point. But The Impossible Project won’t be reacquainting you with something specific from your past. It’s offering a way of looking at things: a chance to peer through the same viewfinder you once did, to use the same lens on the world around you, to recast things in a very particular, familiar light. It’s a bold, romantic effort, like sending thousands of roses to someone who will never take you back. They’ve commandeered a pretty big factory to produce a feeling.

Polaroids by Eryn Loeb