The Not So Impossible Project

With the advent of cheap and accessible digital photography in recent years analogue photography has tended to fall by the wayside. After all, why pay for expensive film and development for every roll of film taken when you can pick up a digital camera for as little as 1500Kč (roughly €60), allowing you to take as many photos as you like, deleting and editing as you document and share. The accessibility of this technology has revolutionised home photography, according to a study from 2007 77% of American households owned at least one digital camera₁. Besides the increasing ease of use and availability of digital cameras is now almost impossible to purchase a mobile phone without some sort of digital photography application. These advances have been hailed as transforming how we see photography . However these same advances have resulted in some casualties, namely analogue photography. One of the most lamented losses being the Polaroid camera and film. The Polaroid had become synonymous with analogue instant photography, most instant photos were referred to as Polaroids, despite the particular brand of film or camera used.Their brand of camera and style of film was recognised worldwide having first entered the camera market in the 1940s. Following the development of integral film in the 1970s, instant photography was used for work and play worldwide.

Andy Warhol's Polaroids, see more here

That is, until the advent of personal digital cameras. In February 2008 Polaroid announced it would cease all production of Polaroid cameras and film. A move brought about both by the increasing popularity and dominance of digital cameras and in part due to an investment fraud scandal involving the Petters group, the company who had been running Polaroid since 2005₂

So where did this leave the lovers of instant photography? Following the announcement there was a rush on the limited amount of film still available, fans of the film began to stockpile, preparing for the inevitability that there would one day be no more₃. Prices on eBay rose as people scrambled to get their hands on the remaining film before it was no more. However, for some aficionados it was not enough to accept the medium’s demise and move on.

Boseman and Kaps.

The demise of the Polaroid company brought about The Impossible Project, a company run by Polaroid and analogue photography fans who were not content to let the demise of the Polaroid company’s film production mean the demise of instant photography altogether. An Austrian Polaroid lover and entrepreneur, Florian Kaps and André Bosman, an employee of the Polaroid corporation for over 20 years and an integral player in the creation of many types of film during his time with the company met at the closing event of the Polaroid factory in The Netherlands. Following much discussion they decided to join forces in an effort to resurrect Polaroid cameras and film. Their idea was borne out of their love of analogue photography, Kaps had previously been a leading member of the Lomographic Society, ‘a magazine, a shop and a community dedicated to analogue photography.’ as well as this he also organised the web gallery Polanoid, an online gallery of Polaroids, and the growing online fan communities and campaigns to save the Polaroid, one facebook group alone has over 49, 000 members and this is by no means the only group of its kind. Initially their focus was the storage and sale of the remaining stock of Polaroid film, this was done through the unsaleable and polapremium websites. However, their eventual aim was to produce and sell working Polaroid cameras and film. This goal was eventually reached following their purchase of the former Polaroid factory in Enschede, The Netherlands. Though a simple restart of production was not possible as the dyes originally used in the production of negatives for the integral film pack were no longer available and would have taken 2 years to develop they utilised the knowledge of former employees to 'reverse engineer' a new version of the film. Not only this, there was also a web campaign to rally support, whether through the sharing of knowledge from around the globe or simply raising both awareness and finance for the production of film through the sale of t-shirts and other merchandise.

But how does this relate to the concepts of Produsage, Collective Intelligence and Transmedia Storytelling? Many aspects of the Impossible Project and it’s precursors (unsaleable and polapremium) demonstrate Produsage through the use of their website and associated side-projects. Produsage involves the creation of shared content through ‘collaborative and continuous building’₄ between Consumers and Producers. This is demonstrated both through the online communities and campaigns to save the Polaroid right down to the curation of online galleries of Polaroid photographs both on Flickr and Polanoid. And this collaborative curation is encouraged by those running The Impossible Project, the website offers a €5 voucher off any product in their shop to those who upload at least 3 Polaroids to the Polanoid website. This curation is one of the aspects of Produsage mentioned in Axel Bruns’ The Art of Produsage ‘in such streams we can see collaborative community efforts to curate it’s content’₅.

Collective intelligence is manifest throughout many aspects of the project, the online campaigns and networking of those involved in the project led to a pooling of knowledge related to the production of the film as it was a complex process. Former employees of the Polaroid company were hired and those who had knowledge and skill in the area were tapped for their contribution. Without this ‘shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals’ the highly complex process involved in recreating working film for Polaroid cameras is unlikely to have happened due to the high skill necessary to operate and modify the lasting machinery in the Polaroid factory.

The Impossible Project's success is a Web 2.0 one, without the collaborative aspects of Produsage and Collective Intelligence I think it is unlikely that they would be producing and selling Polaroid film today, at the very least without the popularity and success they now enjoy. The internet allowed a niche market to make themselves and their demands known. The utilisation of 'long tail demand'₆ i.e. selling a smaller amount of unique products rather than mass sales of popular products has proven that one doesn’t need to cater to a mass audience in order to accomplish success in today’s world of online commerce and community .

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1- Digital Imaging: A Focus on Sharing, Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), 2007

2- ‘Polaroid files for bankruptcy protection’ Andrew Clark, The Guardian, 19-12-2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/19/chapter-11-corporate-bankruptcies-corporatefraud?INTCMP=SRCH)

3- http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2008/02/14/polaroid-film.html

4- http://produsage.org/produsage

5- Axel Bruns: The Art of Produsage, p.235

6- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

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