Polaroid Death Machine

The pace of a photograph’s development lags the instant of its capture. Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mike Scalise acquired decades of photographs from his grandmother who, late in life, turned to instant film as a memory tool. Scalise then took up a Polaroid SX-70 and established a street photography practice, shooting at such a frequency that his film supplier confessed some envy: “I wish to use film at the rate you do! I am a bit too conservative in how I shoot.” Scalise examines the various ways in which photographs affect their creators’ ideas of time. “The photographers I found most interesting communed with the future in some bruised and aching way,” he writes, touching on work by Jamel Shabazz, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Wim Wenders. Scalise’s practice is no static thing, nor are its impacts on him—a point made, to devastating effect, as a photograph of a friend develops new meaning over time.

When people ask me why I shoot Polaroids, I lie to them. I say that it “got me out of the apartment” during lockdown, or that I enjoy the “imperfection” of instant film, or how the image on a developed Polaroid “feels like a memory,” or how “every frame is an object.” “Physical media,” I’ll say proudly. “You can hold this moment in your hand.” Or maybe I’ll talk about how I’m drawn to the tragedy of Polaroid the brand, and its founder, Edwin Land, and how he was a proto–Steve Jobs who, after inventing the revolutionary Land camera—the first to shoot film that produced “instant” images without a darkroom, but not without someone yanking the positive and negative sides from the camera by force—yearned for something simpler, more intimate. So he spent the late sixties and early seventies replacing his once-cumbersome Land cameras with the foldable, portable SX-70, and creating integral film, which developed itself and remains the film type most widely associated with the Polaroid—imagine the boxy profile, the refrain in that old Outkast song. It was a “kind of photography,” Land pronounced in 1970, “that would become part of the human being.”