Sometime in 1978
30 May 2009
29 May 2009
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.
27 May 2009
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.
Wednesday Afternoon
Great pho, even greater basil rolls
Dua Vietnamese Restaurant
53 Broad Street
Atlanta, Georgia
26 May 2009
Hang On
"You get to a certain age. Your bones ache a little. You get up in the morning and you're not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. You hang onto who you were because you don't know any better."
Don Hewitt
24 May 2009
On My iPod This Weekend
My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (Sire Records, 1981)
Brian Eno and David Byrne
The 2006 reissue has extended versions of some songs, several additional tracks and a booklet of interesting background and production notes. What it is missing is Peter Saville's striking, evocative original artwork (above). Pity. While I admittedly bought all things Eno often without so much as an advance listen, Peter Saville's album art probably closed the deal for me as much as anything else.
22 May 2009
20 May 2009
19 May 2009
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