Instant success

Instant success

I chimp. Do you chimp? Chimping is fun, and it tells us – if we can be bothered – how well our pictures are going. On the other hand, I sometimes find a film that I put in the darkroom and somehow forgot. Oops – but it’s fun discovering afresh something that you did a long time back.

In the early days of photography, there was little choice but to prepare you glass plate, expose it, and develop the image in quick succession as you could, because the plates went off rather fast. It may have required a couple of hours end to end, but it was a sort of forerunner of chimping. The end-to-end process couldn’t be divided, so you got feedback on the work necessarily rapidly.

As photographic emulsions became more stable, it became possible to ignore what you’d done for a while. There was time to forget what you’d done, and lose the immediacy of feedback. By the time I started taking pictures, you could get sheets to record exposure details of each image – and I suspect that some people who didn’t use them made a record for specific tricky images.

In between, Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera because he wanted to be able to show his son pictures just after taking them. Polaroid film packs contained two ‘films’ and a series of pods of developing chemicals. After taking each picture, you pulled the film from the camera. The internal mechanism squeezed a pair of sheets of paper together between stainless steel rollers, bursting a pod and spreading the chemicals evenly between the sheets.



The chemicals developed the latent image on the sheet exposed to light, and allowed a positive image to migrate onto the second sheet. All the user had to do was measure time – typically a minute – and then peel the sheets apart to reveal a positive print and a messy paper negative to discard. One version used a sheet of film instead of paper, and the negative could be ‘fixed’ and washed for use in an enlarger.

There was even a 35mm version, although I never tried it. Professional photographers often shot test images on Polaroid to check lighting and exposure: many medium format camera manufacturers offered Polaroid backs to facilitate this.

In around 1980, Polaroid produced a new type of film with all of the chemicals in a sealed plastic sheet – it was ejected from the camera by an electric motor powered by a battery in the eight-shot film pack. You simply watched as the black surface changed into a colour print before your eyes.

As digital photography emerged, the need for a way to preview images reduced, and Polaroid stopped making peel-apart film, and eventually discontinued the single-sheet cameras and film. The latter have been revived by the Impossible Project – and Fuji make a neat little system for wallet-sized images called Instax.

And – at a slight tangent – I remember the day that I rushed from dress rehearsals of a school play to the physics lab darkroom to process and print my film in time to pin damp prints up in the corridor for parents to see on their way into the opening night performance. It was an experience – but possibly not one I’m desperate to repeat fifty years on!

And along the way, I acquired a Polaroid camera from the late Fifties that is possibly the most photogenic prop I own. I’m not the only person to have one and use it this way – but perhaps it’s less appropriate for glamour images than the intriguingly-named Polaroid Swinger: was that intended as homage to Swinging London – or was it for pictures at laid-back and liberated parties that people didn’t want to have developed at Boots?