Warhol started using a Polaroid in the '60s to snap pictures of naked male bums
The English language is peppered with words that honour the prodigious achievements of the human mind. Hoover: a thing that sucks. Sellotape: sticky plastic. Language is, however, a dynamic thing, meaning that obituary notes are as important to its development as birth notices. Take the Polaroid.
For about half a century, this preferred device of alfresco photographers enjoyed a privileged place in the dictionary. Compared to its neighbouring entries "polarography" (some strange chemical process) and "polder" (reclaimed land), the word Polaroid denoted something simple and easy to grasp. Instant photography.
First presented to the world - or rather the Optical Society of America - on February 21 1947, Edwin H Land's invention not only gifted the English language with a new word, a trade name capable of being both a common old noun and sometime verb, it also made his Polaroid Company very rich. At its height, in 1977, four million Polaroid photographs were being taken each day in the US alone.
But Land wasn't the only smarty-pants thinking about how to revolutionise (and commoditise) the human impulse to freeze-frame time. What was once a bright idea, a photograph that comes into being before your eyes, has been superseded by the even smarter idea: a telephone that takes really instant pictures without giving off chemically scented birth smells.
It's all over for the Polaroid. Officially. In February 2008, Polaroid, the company founded by Land in 1937, announced that its factories in the US, Holland and Mexico would stop making Polaroid cameras and film. The notice period has now been worked through. Last month, on Friday, October 9, the use-by date on the last batch of Polaroid film expired.
Taking its cue from the death notice embossed on the silver foil wrap protecting its magic paper, a London gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of Polaroid photographs under the title Polaroid: Exp 09.10.09.
Given the diversity of its former user base - amateur pornographers, suburban moms, passport office hustlers, Russian movie-makers, men in white lab coats - Atlas Gallery's decision to focus only on the output of artists might seem limiting. Yes, but mostly no.
The exhibition brings together a range of unrelated artists drawn to Polaroid's utilitarian and transcendental qualities. Among the central protagonists in this novella-length story, simply titled Polaroid, is a cross-dressing business maven who used his aloof shyness to insinuate himself into high society. His name was Andy Warhol.
Warhol first started using a Polaroid camera in the early '60s, mostly to snap pictures of naked male bums. A decade later he bought the company's Big Shot camera, using it as an essential tool in the making of his large-scale portraits of the eras jet-set society, among them Yves Saint Laurent and Debbie Harry.
With its do nothing but press the button simplicity, the Polaroid camera suited Warhol's industrialised aesthetic perfectly. Which is not to say that he was entirely mechanistic or removed from the process of making his instant portraits.
"Andy loved taking pictures and was able to control the look he wanted from his subjects better when he was the photographer than when he had to work from photographs taken by others," offers Warhol associate Vincent Freemont in a 1992 book about the artist's Polaroid portraits.
"Often he would work for hours to get what he wanted. He took photography seriously and loved doing it. During the mid-'80s, Andy spent a lot of time making pictures. It was even a way he related to people."
Where Warhol used the Polaroid camera to meditate on human presence, the Hungarian-born fashion photographer André Kertész used it in exactly the opposite way. An exile who first made a name for himself as an unconventional and understated observer in 1920's and 30's Paris, he eventually ended up living in New York. Born in 1894, by the early 1970s Kertész was an old man adrift.
Nearing 80, holed up in an apartment near New York's Washington Square, Kertész was mourning his deceased wife, Elizabeth. Unable to make darkroom prints because of a balance disorder, the gift of a new Polaroid SX-70 transformed "a sad old man waiting to die" into "one who could not wait for the next click of the camera", according to Robert Gurbo, author of the book André Kertész: The Polaroids (2007).
The Atlas Gallery exhibition includes examples of Warhol's unvarnished celebrity portraits alongside Kertész's nostalgic (rather than mournful) studies of a big world seen through the window of a small room.
Other big names represented include Walker Evans, the American master of the black and white photograph as social document, who here is revealed to be a playful reader of a full-colour world. Aside from two famous Englishmen, 60's lifestyle icon David Bailey and contemporary artist Marc Quinn, the show also includes Polaroids made by a pervy German.
Helmut Newton worshipped physical scale. His huge photographs of naked women showcase all the method and glamour of a billboard advertising a luxury automobile. Quaint then to think that these over-sexed, over-egoed images actually first existed as teeny bitty "sketchpad" photos, which is how Newton described his Polaroids.
Having lapsed into history, Polaroid going the way of daguerreotype and calotype, it is worth remembering for a moment the mercurial draw of the Polaroid camera.
"People like Polaroids because they're unique," said Newton in a 2002 interview. "There are no negatives. You've got it once and no more. That's the charm and fascination about Polaroids - that they can't be duplicated."
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