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THE IMPOSSIBLE RETURN OF POLAROID

When in 2008, Polaroid announced that they would finally end production of their legendary instant film, they not only rendered 300,000,000 functioning cameras obsolete, it also felt like the final blow to analogue photography, in times when Agfa had gone bankrupt and most film and camera manufacturers settled on digital photography. But it’s sometimes hard to see why the old should always be discarded for the new, instead of different media living side by side peacefully, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

A thought that was also shared by Florian Kaps, a young Austrian passionate about the aesthetic of Polaroids, and who had made a very good living distributing Polaroid worldwide via his online shop, in spite of the rise of digital cameras. Instead of accepting the ways of modern times, he decided to attempt the impossible: he bought one of Polaroid’s factories in the Netherlands, took on ten of the remaining staff and founded the Impossible Project. Since Polaroid still held the patent to their technology, they simply redeveloped a new film suitable for old Polaroid cameras, using Polaroid’s former factory and employes. Two years later, the first batch of new instant film was released, at first in a beautiful silver shade, little later in full technicolour.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to wipe the dust off those old instant cameras: Polaroid is dead, but the Impossible Project is very much alive.

Photography by Heather Champ (top), Rhiannon Adam (middle) and Leah Reich (bottom)