New Dawn Fades

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos – we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors."

-Gibarian, Solaris (2002)

Why Stop Time

William GIbson noted that humans are the only animal who creates prosthetic forms of memory that survive their creator: writing, music, dance, art, photography ...shadows on cave walls.

In counterpoint, Tonino Guerra, in his forward for a book of Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroid photographs, recounted a story about traveling with the film maker Michelangelo Antonioni. In Uzbekistan, Antonioni offered three elderly men an instant photograph he'd taken of them with his SX-70. After looking over the image, the eldest handed back the gift and asked "why stop time?".

Why indeed.

Photographs stop time, though always imperfectly. And no camera accomplishes this feat of imperfection quite like the Polaroid SX-70 cameras and their decendants. Even when integral film and cameras were first introduced by Polaroid in the early 1970s, contemporary analog photography easily outperformed them --if accuracy and detail are alone the metric for a desirable photograph. But Polaroids produced images that were more often than not far from technically accurate but approached something oddly closer to emotional truth. Maybe that's why so many people cling to this magical, frustrating and peculiar technology despite the exponential ease and ubiquity of digital cameras. And why so many people have worked so hard to restore instant photography to the market.

I'm happy it's back in my life.

In Transit

1994

Winter On Gratz Street

Knoxville, Tennessee

Here Come The Warm Jets

Like the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera and Concorde, the U-2 spy plane's spare, singular design has aged insanely well. Even though the first test flight was held in 1955, the glider-like fuselage looks completely contemporary: it could as easily have been drawn up yesterday by Marc Newson. Designed by Kelly Johnson and Lockheed for Cold War high-altitude reconnaissance, the U-2 was first rejected by the Air Force before catching the attention of a civilian review panel that included inventor, industrialist and 20th century American super-genius Edwin Land of Polaroid. He successfully lobbied CIA director Allen Dulles to sponsor development and construction of the plane, which 60 years later is still in chic, stylish service.

Bench Test, Lenoir City 1978

1978

Central Methodist Church

Lenoir City, Tennessee

When Routine Bites Hard

1993

On Gratz Street

Knoxville, Tennessee

Recherché. Like I'd Know.

Biltmore House

Asheville, North Carolina

Summer 1978

Carport 1979

Late Night, 1977

Resurrecting Polaroid. Maybe.

The New York Times has run a couple of interesting articles this week concerning my favorite camera company Polaroid. The slow decline and ultimate financial failure of Polaroid's instant camera and film business was almost inevitable with the advent of digital photography. Still, there are a lot of people out there who love Polaroid photography for reasons more subtle and numerous than mere convenience, its competitive disadvantage against digital technology be damned. As the Times reported this week, a handful of scientists in the Netherlands and an Austrian entrepreneur are attempting to restore Polaroid's abandoned (and almost landfill-bound) manufacturing equipment and return instant film to the market. Article here.

The possibility of returning my SX-70s to active service is very exciting and I wish them great success in this venture. Dr. Land, I think, would be delighted. However more advanced and ubiquitous digital photography inevitably will become, for many people instant photography holds a unique and durable charm. Hopefully there's still room in the marketplace for it.

An expansive gallery of Polaroid photographs, submitted by readers, is posted on the New York Times here. It's definitely worth looking at.

Objects of Desire™

In an endless stream of fungible electronic devices, the life cycle of the mobile phone is among the most fleeting. They live fast, grow worn and scratched in our pockets and bags, then shoot off towards obsolence like a cannonball. As commodity items, cell phones rarely achieve any durable notoriety for their design, which is sad really, considering how ubiquitous they are. We talk, text and surf on them for a while then off they go to leak a lengthy list of nasty chemicals into some unseen landfill that never seems to be in our back yard.

The Sony Ericsson T610, released in 2003, was an exception. Designed by Erik Ahlgren in near-Bauhaus gloss black plastic and brushed aluminum, it was the first mobile I fell in love with as a design object.

The T610 came equipped with a mediocre near-VGA quality camera that produced grainy, oddly-colored photographs that were, in a number of unflattering respects, the digital equivalent to the liquidy and often equally indistinct Polaroid images I had fallen in love with some 20 years earlier. While the T610 didn't spit the photo out into your hand, it could transmit it by MMS, Bluetooth or email easily enough, which gave it some of the immediacy of a Polaroid camera.

Inspite of --or maybe because of-- its pixilated, closed-circut security camera quality images, this little phone wound up becoming my favorite camera until it finally grew so dented and frayed and wonky that I was forced to replace it.

Late Night Storm

1981

Long exposure of a summer storm

Lenoir City, Tennessee

It's A Godawful Small Affair

1983

Knoxville, Tennessee

The Joads Called. They Want Their Space Heater Back.

1977

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Beginning

I haven't decided what all this is going to be about yet. Probably one of those any-road-will-take-me-there things. In whatever direction it heads, my interests in technology, design and how they intersect will be in tow. So it feels right that my first posts should be drawn from the ground zero of those interests.

In 1975 my parents gave me a Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera. Depending upon your vintage, you may remember it: a sleek, chrome and leather artifact that, when folded, looked like an oversized cigarette case. At the time of its introduction in 1972, it was nothing short of a revolution in optics, engineering, chemistry, microelectronics and product design. So, my earliest introduction to design and photography was visualized through the awkward viewfinder of a very peculiar and flawed little picture taking machine that had a preprogrammed mind of its own and produced interesting (if not always accurate, or conventional, or pleasing) images.

My love of the SX-70 was about more than pictures. It was at least as much about the fun of working around it's peculiarities and programming as it was the sensory experience of using it. Squeezing the shutter touched off this little symphony of whirring motors and pivoting mirrors. Even the film's odor, the emulsion and developers and opacifiers, was oddly pleasing. Commes des Garcons should clone the fragrance.

From the moment I loaded the first film pack, I spent an awfully lot of time reimagining my world through this camera.

That's where it all started for me.

Synchronize Your Watches, There's Still Time To Kill

1978

Winter evening, Knoxville, Tennessee

This is where it all started.