The Last Camera You'll Ever Buy
When you stare into the viewfinder and the viewfinder stares back at you.
Published
Computer Love is a monthly column that investigates new technology with the purpose of making it feel less dense and more fun. In this installment we examine the shifting landscape of commercial photography and how it shapes the moments we capture.
This past August, Byline was invited to Blank Studio NYC in SoHo for a hands-on demo of Polaroid’s new I-2 camera. It was an impressive but tame affair that would lead me to something of a creative identity crisis.
I’m not a photographer, but last autumn, when I thought I might want to be one, I walked around SoHo with a Canon EOS Rebel T5 that I bought used in 2016 for $320. You can see the photos I took here, but you wouldn’t want to because they were mediocre, out of focus, and not worth the time it would take to process them in Photoshop. According to the marketing materials for Polaroid’s new $599.99 camera, “for the imperfectionists,” that makes me their ideal demographic.
When I arrived at the temporary showroom, I was welcomed by Ruth Bibby, the PR & Communications Manager at Polaroid. We talked briefly about Polaroid’s history and the ephemeral nature of instant photography. It’s an outlier in today’s camera market, because the photos have no embedded metadata and don’t live in the ambiguous cloud. In Ruth’s words, “it can’t be hacked”. The writer David Sax, has written extensively about the embrace of analog technologies among a sea of digital tools. He claims that analog appeals to the head and the heart; the head because there are logical reasons why you would want a physical record of what you create and the heart because there is an inherent “joy of things” that ties back to a larger community of makers. We hear this story every few years as new generations embrace vinyl or physical books despite the availability of massive digital libraries.