Polaroid: Extinct

This is a sad time for art. And life. And culture. And anything that means anything. Next to this bit of prose (ramble) is a collection of Maripol's polaroids.

Basements, drugs, paint, New York, eighties, shades, bangles, Warhol, lipstick, nightclubs, iconoclasting Madonna, Studio 54, disco...she lived a Bret Easton Ellis cliche. Brilliantly. And look at the images that came from it!

We're careening towards the end of an era as extinction closes in on Polaroid film stock. I feel like the last dinosaur who snubbed the DeLorean to get back BC and clambered for the newest iPod instead.

So many occasions I thought about buying a Polaroid camera and didn't. I wish I could tell my tiny ten year old self to save all my pennies, go out and get snap happy.

So what's our equivalent from '08? The digital image? Comparatively cold and hostile against the polaroid, which existed for us to look back on and get all "oh, memories". The digital image is a platform of self-promotion for the facebook masses. It's boring but I never realised how boring until the prospect of something exciting was taken away.

Where's a DeLorean when you need one?

There's something innately impure about that flawless digital image. Although great for commercial purposes, it gives nothing to the personal photograph. I can get nostalgic looking at a polaroid seconds after taking it. It's more a representation of a moment, like it didn't really happen. Encapsulating a feeling rather than mimicking its subject.

You could be the shittiest photographer of all time and still get away with a decent shot of a dog's backside...if you wished. Plus they're pocket-sized. And who doesn't love all things mini?

And it's tangible! There's nothing more isolated than a digi-image staring back at you all bright and HD-ed up to the eyeballs. Why were we not all out buying polaroid cameras and film all these years? We should have spent that bit extra and stuck them on lamp posts and walls as our own glossy graffiti. Flawed images to reflect a flawed world! It would have been beautiful! Except when psychos started putting up pictures of themselves covered in pig's blood, eating their mate's foreskin.

Maybe I'll start getting into the disposable. Or analogue. Film is not dead! I won't let it die!! OK, enough of the dramatics...

No more Maripols.
No more Warhols.