New faces, instant memories: in defence of the Polaroid camera

When you go out together, while everyone else dances, chats, or poses for the camera, one person is always left with the phone. This person becomes the evening's cameraperson and gathers evidence of everybody else's joy. But when the photos finally turn up, something is strangely missing: the person who took them is almost nowhere to be seen.

I'm familiar with that situation. More than once, I've gone through my camera roll the morning after a night out and found dozens of photos of my friends and very few of myself. Although I had recorded the evening, I still ended up not being in the visual memory of it. It is one of the little contradictions of our digital age: although we have never been better at preserving moments, we are becoming more and more absent from the moments that we preserve.

This is why I have a soft spot for the Polaroid camera.

In this day and age when smartphones are available, and digital cameras have become incredibly sophisticated, the Polaroid seems almost intentionally inconvenient. There is no screen on which to look at the picture, no chance of taking twenty different photographs of the same subject, and no editing software to fix a badly angled shot. All one gets is the sound of the shutter being pressed, after which there is uncertainty about what has actually been captured.

In my opinion, that uncertainty is the key reason I always take my digital camera when I’m out.

The way we think about photographs has been changed by digital photography. Before sharing an image with anyone else, we can correct it, crop it, apply a filter and perfect it. The photograph has therefore become less a record of reality and more a carefully constructed version of it. A Polaroid doesn't conform to this desire for perfection; its blurry edges, poor exposure, and accidental expressions are not always defects; rather, they prove the moment actually took place.

Above all, the Polaroid changes how people take photos in social situations. Because the camera is small, people can pass it around, encouraging everyone to take part. The friend who normally records the evening can now hand over that duty and take part instead. Unlike before, they are not just preserving the memory; they are actually involved in it.

There's also a really communal aspect to waiting for an instant photograph to develop. In a world where immediate results are the norm, the few minutes spent watching the image gradually appear take on a kind of ceremonial quality. People gather together, discuss whether the photograph has come out, and laugh when it turns out entirely different from what they expected. The picture becomes an experience before it turns into a souvenir.

Perhaps for this reason, the Polaroid has been so long-lasting. Its appeal isn't due to technical superiority, since a modern smartphone produces a sharper, brighter, more reliable image; the Polaroid offers something technology cannot easily replicate and that is limitation.

You can't replay the same moment indefinitely or edit yourself into perfection; you must accept the photograph as it is.

Maybe that is why it is a more accurate record of friendship. A carefully edited photograph might remind us of what we looked like, while a slightly crooked, imperfect Polaroid would remind us of who we were.