The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography by Peter Buse (review)

In this fascinating and lively book, Peter Buse, professor of performance and screen studies at Kingston University, London, pens a fond history of the rise and fall of the form of instant photography produced by the Polaroid Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Buse is less concerned with the technology of the process or even the pictures it produced than he is with the performative means by which Polaroid pictures came into being. Dispensing with the long lag time between exposure and image and all the darkroom work in between, Polaroid photography anticipated the immediacy of digital photography—picture-making and picture-viewing occur almost simultaneously, becoming, as Buse well describes, a fun, party-like experience. With Polaroid, as it would become with digital photography, picture-making is less about the finished work, whether viewed as an image or an object, than it is about mediation of experience and the production of a quickly made and easily consumed relic of it.

The book sidesteps in-depth discussion of both technology and art: Buse is happy to leave the science of Polaroid as a kind of mysterious black box that produces wonders, at most noting the physical presence of the expended chemical pod that necessitates that the bottom edge of the SX-70 print be larger than the other three edges. And for his illustrations and examples, he turns only occasionally to Polaroid pictures by known artists, arguing for the marginality of such work in comparison to the billions of prints made with the technology by ordinary people in thrall to its immediacy.

From the start Buse makes no secret of his wish to read Polaroid photography through the lens of the revolution into digital photography that followed it. He finds in the cultural formation around Polaroid the progenitors of the radical changes that digital cameras, smart phones, the internet, and social media would bring to photography. He documents this cultural formation through its representation in advertising, annual reports, corporate strategies, films, and television series. What is perhaps saddest in Buse’s mind is that Polaroid as a business failed to capitalize on the uncanny way that it produced digital photography avant la lettre. Rather than realize that it had in place almost all aspects of the new photography but digitization itself, and then exploit that knowledge, Polaroid missed the boat, remaining invested in the ingenious chemical pods on the prints that made them possible. It was convinced that hard-copy images, like those its process made, would remain an essential step even in a digitized media ecology. The company thought no one would want to view still images on what it insisted on characterizing as a TV screen.

By the end of the book, Buse tries to understand small-scale efforts to revive the manufacture of a Polaroid-like film, suggesting that these recent efforts be seen as a nostalgic return to the analog, the handmade, the physical.

The Camera Does the Rest has a richness of detail and language that this summary belies. Buse turns to myriad unconventional but vivid sources in his effort to resurrect just what it felt like to make, pose for, and view Polaroid images. This experience of instant photography is his true focus, and he addresses it from multiple, new, persuasive perspectives. In so doing, he makes the magic of the Polaroid moment vivid for those readers for whom that era is now a faint memory and for those readers too young to have experienced it.

To my knowledge, the book has no peers in evoking the lost moments of Polaroid photography. While this alone makes it a mighty contribution to the study of visual culture, I would suggest that, in addition, the archeological approach Buse takes to his topic serves as an excellent model for scholars seeking in its archaeological approach, how to recuperate the novelty experienced when now familiar technologies were once new.