Everyone Loves Polaroid
 Everyone Loves Polaroid
Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs.
 📸For Your 👀 Only:  Brock Fetch Steve Crist's new book Polaroid Now highlights the ongoing allure of instant film, showcasing artists who are working with Polaroids in all kinds of unique ways. Crist had previously written about the Polaroid archive, and this book serves as an extension into the present day.
Are there commonalities between the old generation and the new and how they're approaching?
The common thing between some of the older pictures and now is that Polaroid has always been a material that was often used for experimentation, and it yielded a slightly unpredictable result sometimes depending on how you used it, and often that led to a lot of happy accidents.
I think these are younger digital creatives who have locked onto the pleasures of analog photography. In speaking to many of them, they've found their voice through the material, which is an interesting thing for an artist.
Polaroid is something that runs counter to our modern, digital, super polished, very predictable creative process that we currently all have. If we're together somewhere and we all have our iPhones out, we pretty much all take the same picture nowadays. With Polaroid, you actually do take a different picture. You create something that's very unique  Grant Hamilton And there's like the delight in having to wait for it, even if it is only 30 seconds.
Yeah. I mean, that's the funny thing too, right? Because now everything's so much sharper and instant click, boom, it's on your screen. Having to wait for it sometimes is a little bit better, I think folks do enjoy that process. When Polaroid started, the development factor was this kind of magical thing. All these decades later, even though we have perfected instant photography, people still enjoy it. I don't know if it reminds you of something you did as a kid or something, but adult people enjoy watching the process happen and enjoy the flow meditative process of creating on the material. I think that's kind of cool.
How did you go about choosing the artists, since it does feel like there's sentimental feeling, uniting them together?
We were trying to find people that were doing something a little more artsy with the material and not just merely documenting something, because Polaroid lends itself better to softer or more romantic photos.
In the first Taschen book, the gatekeepers were curating those photographs. Galleries used to exhibit large Polaroid photographs right next to regular photography, and they were sold as pieces in galleries.That's kind of ended for the most part.  Erika Blumenfeld It's hard to curate and judge the aesthetic content coming from such a diverse range of people, but we wanted to make a book that felt good and felt like it was celebrating what's going on. We tried to pick imagery that was unique and also felt like it was new or fresh.
Do you have a favorite artist in the book, like someone who really blew your mind with how they were using the Polaroids? It's hard to pick like one, but I'll say one person, Erica Blumenfeld. I think she only has one page in the book, but she's a very interesting person. She's a science-based person, and she has been doing art on the side. I love her work because of how she uses this material and how she creates these large installation pieces out of her work.
What are some of the elements that you're looking for to bring out when you're putting together work from many, many different artists? What were some of the motivations for this book?
I wanted to remind people that Polaroid wasn't a dead thing, this brand is still enduring, but really could have so easily been lost. The Impossible Project that took this on before they really bought the Polaroid brand fully. They really did an impossible job, gathering this gear, trying to find some old people who had retired who knew how to mix the chemistry. And they literally saved the process and got people to invest in it. And I know it's more of a labor of love business. We think of Polaroid as a big brand, but in reality it's now very much a young group, almost like a startup company. It's not something everyone's using; it's an esoteric art brand now. I want to see them succeed.
And then because Polaroid is so accessible as a medium, you don't have to be a professional photographer to do this work. You just have to have patience and you have to like to experiment.
We live in such an image-saturated society now. I always think part of our role as editors or publishers is to document movements and things going on in the arts over time, because the internet is ephemeral, but the books last forever. Maybe now it's a cool book, but maybe 20 years from now, in a way it'll be a little snapshot of 2021.
 Rhiannon Adam
 📸MORE FROM OUR DESK 📸 As always, here are some of the best photo stories from around the internet, and what we loved from our desk.  New York Daily News via Getty Images  Juergen Teller  Dr. Andrew Mark Posselt
5 THINGS WE LOVED THIS WEEK 1. BuzzFeed Launches Afghan Journalist Fellowship
2. This show at Harvard about war and society in America
3. Myriam Abdelaziz's new book We The People which is remarkably democratic
4. This older Nat Geo article on the stories behind the iconic collars of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
5. Our favorite exhibitions at Photoville!
LAST LOOK  A young Gary Coleman at the 1979 Emmy Awards "We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us." — Ralph Hattersley That's it for this week! Kate, Kirsten + Pia
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. Pia Peterson is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. You can always reach us here.
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