Image of the Week: Birches, Middlebury, Vermont

We've already lost a great number of the "Old Guard" photographic products and companies to the inexorable march of digital, but when Polaroid announced two years ago that it was ceasing production of its legendary instant photography films, photographers around the world let out a collective gasp. Polaroid, a company with a photographic brand name as ubiquitous as Kleenex and as legendary as Levi's, suddenly stopped making the product that made it famous, and upon which thousands of artists, scientists, and consumers depended for their imaging needs. The demand dried up, sales dropped. Poof. Gone.

Sure, Fuji continues to make instant film products in pack form, but nothing that replaces the look and feel of Polaroid Type 55, that gorgeous, fine-grained, long-tonal-scale print-and-negative instant film that has long been regarded as one of the finest black-and-white film products on the planet. Unlike the rest of Polaroid's product line, Type 55 produces both a black-and-white instant print and a negative that can be saved and printed (or scanned) later. Rumor has it that the negative stock was based on the reknowned Kodak Panatomic X, a high-altitude reconnaissance film with extremely fine grain and resolution. To produce and preserve a Type 55 negative for later use, you had to expose at around ISO 40-50, develop the sheet in the proper Polaroid sheet film processor, peel the print and mask away from the negative, then immerse the negative in a bath of 18% Sodium Sulfite solution to clear the processing chemicals.

So, yeah, using Type 55 was kind of pain in the rear: it was slow, it wasn't really "instant" unless you carried a bucket of Sodium Sulfite solution with you into the field, and the developing speed was very dependent on the ambient temperature. Many photographers (including myself) would simply choose to stack up the exposed sheets of film and process them later at home under controlled conditions.

It was well worth the effort. The images you could get with Type 55 were unparalled.

There's hope still. A group of photographic enthusiasts have banded together to create The Impossible Project. The group bought Polaroid's Netherlands factory and equipment and are committed to launching a new line of analog instant film products in 2010. Just recently, they announced that Polaroid itself has commissioned them to produce a run of Polaroid-branded instant films.

Does that mean Type 55 will make a comeback? Probably not, but you never know.

Have questions or comments? Send me an email.

Technical Data

I photographed Birches, Middlebury, Vermont with a Tachihara 4x5 Field Camera and a Schneider 210mm ƒ/5.6 Symmar-S lens on Polaroid Type 55, exposed at EI 50. The exposure was 1/2 second at ƒ/11.

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