The Pickle Post

by Vandana Verma on 21 Nov 2009

Recently I’ve been struck by an overwhelming wave of nostalgia for lost technology. From the hiss and crackle of snow on analogue television broadcasting and the swing of a rotary phone’s dial to the comforting weight of a VHS cassette, the obsolescence of these things stings more than mere nostalgia.

VCR players were permanently shelved with the advent and free availability of DVDs, propelling the device into the graveyard of technological obscurity. I’d never dispute the far, far superior quality of a DVD, and I think I’d complain (vociferously) if forced to watch films on an old VCR, but it worries me that that childhood staple can be so easily relegated to history, when it’s emotional hold feels so much more significant.

But I find solace in websites like The Impossible Project (www.the-impossible-project.com), that stand testament to my belief that certain technologies transcend obsolescence by being eternally sought-after.

For those unfamiliar with The Impossible Project, its creators aim for the “re-invention of analog instant film”, engineering a substitute for Polaroid’s discontinued product for enthusiasts and analogue-lovers who are left bereft with no new supply of Polaroid film.

Not as prevalent here as they were elsewhere in the world, I still remember coveting a Polaroid camera in my childhood, and being instantly smitten the first time I heard its ‘whirr’ and watched that little square pop out the slot.

A Polaroid has a guarantee of authenticity that digital can never achieve or hope to replicate. More than any other medium, the Polaroid that emerges from my camera is an artefact. It’s in your hand, to be passed around, to be written on and has an inherent texture which is an unfathomable concept in the digital world.

How many of your digital photographs do you actually print?

No, me neither.

They sit in my computer; I might email them to a friend or upload some to Facebook, but that’s it. They aren’t real, and they don’t feel authentic: just strings of code that require other strings of code to manifest on screen.

I was in university when my first dalliances with Polaroid’s began. The ubiquity of digital meant that a digital camera didn’t have the same sense of occasion that these boxy eighties throwbacks did, and regular film wasn’t as instantly satisfying. As I would come to appreciate, Polaroids used to be the preferred medium for secret, stolen moments and illegal or inappropriate activity; it would never have felt right to have had a disapproving photo-lab technician flip through those images chronicling nights of bad behavior.

What I loved most about Polaroid images was the serendipity of every dreamy, memory soaked image. Polaroid cameras and film were never of terribly high quality. The lenses were cheap and often plastic, and the chemicals in the film behave unpredictably in varying temperatures, making pictures that faded and streaked as they aged.

To many (myself included), these imperfections and inherent flaws created uniqueness, lending character to images and rendering them irreplaceable. In that sense, every picture is an experiment: a tightrope between science and luck. Your image is instant, like digital, but with added complexity, warmth and texture, like film.

Obituaries for old, residual media are nearly always written prior to the actual death. The familiar rhetorical keening and pronunciation that such and such medium “is dead” relies on an anticipatory logic that often proves not so much to be wrong categorically - for on the digital front a sea-change is perpetually upon us - as it is a miscalculation in a manner unforetold by the obituarist.

Consider that old allegation that demise of the theatre is to be blamed on cinema, and compare it to nineteenth-century claims that photography would render painting obsolete. Predictions of obsolescence assign particular roles and functions to any media, rendering them obsolete when a new technology is able to duplicate this function. If generating likeness were the only function of the painter, the invention of the camera might well have sounded the painter’s death knell.

Pitting old media against new encourages a false opposition that conceals what is incomparable about each.

The obsolescence of contemporary digital devices is inescapable. This isn’t cynicism, it’s fact. But while a lot of things have been banished by their digital contemporaries, not all of them deserve this fate.

In the same way that convenience and precision of image doesn’t always seem a good enough reason to stick with digital cameras, portability isn’t reason enough to stick with CDs. In the age of the mp3, sound quality is worse than it’s ever been, where increasingly albums are mastered and compressed to increase sound volume as much as possible, obscuring finer sonic detail, and leaving behind a distinctive percussive distortion where music sounds tinny and hollow. Vinyl’s warmer, richer sound has long been touted by audiophiles, and since it’s impossible to compress audio on vinyl to these extremes, they also offer more nuanced sound.

Listen.

You’ll hear the richness of vinyl because you can compare it to the sound on your Ipod.

India’s amazingly varied light means that fans of light-leaking Lomography cameras now abound. The poor construction of these plastic Russian cameras isn’t so much viewed as a flaw as an additional feature: the light leaks yield wonderful optical aberrations and images seep across film sprocket holes creating fluid and dreamy landscapes.

This burgeoning lo-fi photography enthusiasm takes us back to essentials: this is photography that’s simple and basic, but not faceless. If you want a faithful and true representation of reality, reach for your DSLR. If you’re after a dream, reach for your lomo or your Polaroid.

Edwin Land, inventor of instant photography said, “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible,” and so The Impossible Project was thus appropriately named: reconstruction of a defunct (not profit making) product on this scale is unprecedented. But testimony to the commitment of this small but devoted subculture, production on new batches of film is expected to begin by the end of this year, and so in 2010 fans of this dying photo format will be graced with the revival of the Polaroid.

Say cheese, the pre-digital classic is not dead.