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Mannequins pose in the dusty factory, lines of Polaroid images spread before them, their careers as test subjects for batches of film seemingly over. This factory in Enschede, Holland, was for 20 years Polaroid's main European base, a complex of six buildings dedicated to making the iconic instant film. Today it is home to a team of just 15. Their mission: to bring instant film back to life.
In 2004, Polaroid decided to stop producing the negatives needed to create its instant film. It believed that it had stockpiled enough material to produce ten million films a year for ten years.
It was wrong. Demand was far higher than expected, and by mid-2008 the negatives were almost gone. Sixty-two years after its creator, Edwin Land, had unveiled his first instant negative, Polaroid film was seemingly finished.
Supply problems had troubled the company from the start.
Polaroid made only 60 units of Land's first instant camera, the Land Camera. Fifty-seven of that first batch went on sale before Christmas 1948 at Jordan Marsh, a Boston department store. The company estimated that the stock would last until it could manufacture a second run. All 57 cameras sold out on the first day.
Before Land, photography involved exposing light-sensitive material, developing, fixing and printing it. As a first-year student at Harvard, Land thought it might be possible to create polarising film by lining up crystals of iodoquinine sulphate and embedding them in transparent plastic to prevent them from moving apart. From there, he created Polaroid instant film. It held the developing solution in a hermetically sealed compartment bundled with the photosensitive paper. Pressure rollers in the camera spread the chemicals across the paper when it was exposed, activating the reaction that developed the print. Polaroid instant film was an immediate success. At its peak, in 1991, sales of cameras and films were close to $3 billion. But by 2004, the digital-photography revolution had led the company to refocus. The factory continued to produce, ship and sell films -24million of them in 2008 alone - but the scarcity of raw materials and the shift from film had numbered its days.
On June 14, 2008, Polaroid held a closing party at the Enschede factory. It was there that the man tasked with killing off Polaroid instant film met a man obsessed with saving it. By the end of the evening, they had a shared mission: to create a new instant film that would work in existing Polaroid cameras as well as a new model.
André Bosman was the man Polaroid charged with shutting down the Enschede complex. It was not a role he cherished. In 28 years with the firm, he had risen from engineer to factory manager. With his neat, scraped back hair, Bosman, now 56, is enthusiastic but extremely precise, choosing all his words with care.
Years earlier, he had drawn up a survival plan for a smaller-scale operation. The factory was equipped to crank out 100 million film packs a year, but Bosman had a strategy for profitably producing ten million. "They were not interested," he shrugs. "That's the problem with big companies - back then, Polaroid was still 5,000 people. If you draw up an organisation of 200 people making ten million films, whose interest is it in? The customer's, but not the top management's."
In October 2001, the original Polaroid Corporation had filed for bankruptcy in the US. Most of the firm's assets - including the Polaroid name and its profit-making foreign subsidiaries - were sold to an investment firm, One Equity Partners. The company's name was changed to the Polaroid Holding Company. On April 27, 2005, Petters Group Worldwide acquired the Polaroid Holding Company. The Petters Group had a long history of buying up failed companies to exploit prominent brand names, and Polaroid was an obvious target.
Bosman's role, with the factory's closure just months away, now came down to breaking apart the machinery, selling what could be sold, and handing over the keys to the buildings' owners. He also had to help the factory's workers come to terms with the end of jobs many had held for more than 30 years. Now, on that Saturday in June 2008, Bosman had been given another mission by Polaroid's US management. An entrepreneur and instant-film obsessive, Florian Kaps, had been badgering them about "saving" instant film. Bosman had to tell this lunatic to stop. "It was a stupid thing to ask me," he says. "I was one of the people saying: you don't need to stop!"
Kaps's fascination with Polaroid began relatively late. In 2004, he was working for the Lomographic Society, which promotes the cult analogue Lomo camera. "Everybody was scared because of the digital revolution," he recalls in his languid Austrian accent. "But I said, 'Hey, maybe this isn't the biggest threat but the biggest chance.' I started searching for the most analogue form out there."
He settled on two possibilities - Super 8 and Polaroid instant film.
Kaps, 40, is wearing a T-shirt with a stylised sketch of the Polaroid SX-70 camera and the slogan "Golden Years". His long hair is tied into a messy ponytail, his stubble rough and scratchy. He is restless as he talks, repeatedly picking up Wired's voice recorder to inspect it and swinging back on his chair. His graduate thesis was on the structure of spiders' eyes - but he describes himself as "a salesman".
The complexity of Super 8 deterred him. "You need the camera, you need the film, you need to develop that and you need the projector." Polaroid was a simpler prospect: "It is the perfect medium. It is the most analogue film - it develops in the palm of your hand. It also has a lot of the advantages of digital - it's an instant picture. But it's more than just a picture. A lot of emotions are attached to it."
He found it fascinating that people shook the film. "Why do they do that? Even if it's the first time they've used a Polaroid, they immediately start shaking it." Kaps made inquiries and discovered that Polaroid had all but given up on the product that made its name. Film was difficult to find and the brand had little presence online. "I said - this sounds like something that should be done."
Kaps bought an original Polaroid SX-70 camera on eBay. "I got this camera and took it out," he says, his eyes widening with wonder. "It had brown leather and chrome. I unfolded it and pushed the button. Film came out and began to develop. Even my wife, who is always suspicious of my new fantasies and dreams, said 'Wow! This is the most beautiful camera I have ever seen.'"
Armed with proposals for building a new online community for Polaroid lovers and plans to sell instant film online, Kaps made an appointment with Polaroid's management in Germany. The representatives he met were not enthusiastic. Tom Petters had decreed that the company must focus on selling Polaroid televisions and digital-photo frames. There was no budget for analogue. Kaps was told that he could become a Polaroid retailer if he placed a minimum order of €200,000. "I said, 'That's not what I was expecting.' I talked to my friends and family and raised the money." Together with Andi Höeller, a web designer he had met at the Lomographic Society, Kaps built Polanoid, a fan community, and Polapremium, an online film retailer. "We bought the last remaining film for the Polaroid SX-70 camera and became a more and more respected outlet for expired films," says Kaps. "We found out that it's really the young customers who are discovering and rediscovering Polaroid film. Our customers all use digital cameras, but they want to have an analogue camera next to that. As with vinyl, they started rediscovering the old things.
Everybody has CDs and an MP3 player, but that doesn't mean that they don't want to spend some money on a nice record player."
The first Kaps knew of Polaroid's plan to cease production came with the firm's official statement in December 2007 which declared: "Due to market conditions, Polaroid has discontinued almost all of its instant camera production." He immediately contacted the company hoping to reverse the decision. The only response he received was an invitation to the closing party.
Bosman by now had all but given up hope: "After years of fighting, you have to accept the reality and move on. But I had no idea of what I would move on to." Meeting Kaps changed that. "We immediately inspired each other. We're very different people - he's this marketing, sales person and I'm from a management, technical background. You can drive a train through the differences between us. But we both wanted the same thing - to save Polaroid instant film."
Kaps was baffled by Polaroid's decision to shut down a factory that both Bosman and he considered profitable. He knew that the buildings had been sold to a property consortium, so saw no way of stopping the closure. But Bosman knew differently - he had heard from the developers that the economic downturn had delayed its plan for at least ten years. "I said: 'We can stay here for ten years and keep making film?'" says Kaps. "But then I thought, 'It's too late - the machines are already destroyed'," Bosman recalls shaking his head. "'I'm responsible for destroying the machines, and the destruction team arrives on Monday.'"
Besides, the materials required to make new negatives were no longer available. Without them, there could be no more instant film.
Bosman had an idea. "I and my team have closely looked at this and maybe, just maybe, with some time and a small team, there's a chance we could invent a new form of film." "That was it!"Kaps exclaims, bringing his fists down on the table in the Enschede factory canteen as he recalls that moment at the party. "We stopped drinking beer. I told him that I was selling the films and that there was demand. We agreed there and then: he had to stop the machines being destroyed and I had to contact the management and get them to talk to us." Kaps knew Polaroid would be reticent, so he fought dirty. "I said, 'Please talk to us - or we'll have to tell the press that there is a chance to keep Polaroid instant film alive, but you prefer to destroy it.'"
The next day, a Sunday, was Father's Day and Bosman's family gathered for a celebration. He wasn't home. He had sat all night in his office at the factory with Kaps, sketching out the plan to revive instant film. "I wrote a lot of emails," says Kaps. "The Polaroid management called me on Monday and said, 'OK, we'll discuss it, but don't do anything rash. The situation at the factory is out of control.'"
Paul Latka, a balding 51-year-old who began his 30-year Polaroid career in Enschede as a production engineer, recalls that dramatic day.
Bosman told the workers that the dismantling was to stop. The factory would not be sold. "It was a little bit strange for people," says Latka, now in charge of IT infrastructure for the revival project. "I had cried when I realised my job of 30 years was over. We knew for two years the factory was going to close. It was almost like when you know someone is dying. We were in shock.
Polaroid had died in Enschede."
Bosman was the focus for a lot of anger and resentment that day. "It was an emotional explosion," he says frankly. "They'd known for years we were going to stop. Of course there were people who were angry with me. They felt I was fooling around with their emotions.
Some people were angry, some enthusiastic, saying, 'Can I be on the team?'" Meanwhile, the Polaroid management were enraged. "I stopped the demolition first thing in the morning and then went to the directors," says Bosman. "By the time I got there, word had already reached them. There was no time to play by the book."
Bosman had the technical knowledge to assemble the team to revive instant film, and Kaps and a third member of the project's partnership, Marwan Saba, knew how to assemble the money and investors they would need. "We only had a short period to collect the money," says Kaps. "We needed funds to buy the machines and rent the building for a minimum of one year. We also needed money to heat the building - below a certain temperature the machines will simply not work." In three months, Kaps collected €1.2 million from a range of private investors. He already had a good network of investors thanks to Polanoid, his Polaroid site, and Polanoir, a gallery for Polaroid pictures which he had set up in Vienna (it now has outposts in Barcelona and Berlin). "The only thing missing was a better price for film or the chance of producing an exclusive product. This was our chance," he says, smiling. "Andre said we had a 50/50 chance of success, but that's a pretty good chance. We had the product, we had the demand, now we needed the machines and the people to make it."
Bosman and Kaps needed to secure the machines from Enschede.
Bosman had done his sums and concluded that, even if it were possible to find a company that could replicate the machines, each would cost at least £10 million to build. So the ten machines remaining in the factory were worth, to him, at least £100 million.
The blueprints to recreate the machines are still stored at Enschede, filling a huge cabinet with hundreds of drawers of microfilm.
Polaroid's management considered the factory plant to be essentially scrap. In their view, without the negatives required to produce instant film, the machines were useless. "We would go into meetings," says Kaps, chuckling, "and they would tell us: 'We cannot sell you those machines. We have looked at it closely. All the experts have looked at it and it's impossible. You cannot reproduce Polaroid film.'" Kaps jumped on this argument: "I said:
'OK, that's fine. If it's impossible, those machines must be incredibly cheap. Because if it's impossible, they're useless.'"
He told Polaroid's management that he would sign legal papers to that effect, and that it was not his plan to reproduce their instant film. The business he and Bosman planned had a different goal - to produce a brand-new instant film. And that very threat of impossibility suggested a company name: The Impossible Project. "I told Polaroid, 'Listen, I'll even call the company Impossible to make sure everybody knows you told me that this task is impossible,'" says Kaps.
Kaps knew the name was a great hook for journalists and investors itching for a challenge. "From the beginning we let the investors know that it was Impossible, but that it could become
'I'm Possible' too," he continues. Researching Land's life online, Kaps discovered a quote from a 1987 Forbes profile. In "The Vindication Of Edwin Land", the inventor had opined: "Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." The Impossible Project had its mission statement.
Its goal was simple: within a year, create a new form of instant film that will work in old Polaroids. The time constraint was purely practical: existing film is fast running out. Bosman says: "We want the fading of the old inventory to be counterbalanced by us getting new film on to the market." The Impossible Project's first film, a black-and-white integral film (meaning there's no need to peel the film apart) uses a transparent sheet, a titanium- dioxide white pigment based developer and a negative with a black back coat. One frame leaves the camera with no separation required.
Polaroid never produced this form of black-and-white film. Its own product was a peel-apart film. Though the Impossible film uses different developer chemicals to Polaroid's, the principle is similar.
In an open-plan area the team calls "The Lab", Martin Steinmeijer is working on the chemical formulation for the new film. Steinmeijer has a shock of messy Harry Potter-esque black hair and glasses that list to one side. He worked on chemical engineering at Polaroid for 23 years. "The problem we had is that some materials that Polaroid used are simply not made any more," he mutters nervously. Steinmeijer's main task is to develop the various layers of material required to develop a photograph on the new film - a positive material to act as an image-receiving layer, a timing layer to control the length of development, and a neutralisation layer to end that process. "If you don't stop it at the right time," says Steinmeijer, "it will just keep on developing."
After much experimentation, the Impossible Project has succeeded in producing a black-and-white integral film. Steinmeijer reveals a series of test pictures, each showing his eager face staring inquisitively into the lens.
After coming up with a name for its product, the Impossible Project set itself six further challenges; designing the package for the chemicals and film; developing a photosystem; manufacturing a battery; creating a new plastic cartridge and spring; designing foils; and developing the film coating. Inevitably, there were unforeseen problems: the cost of materials and chemicals alone was £1 million up front. "That was not part of our equation on the first day," says Bosman, rolling his eyes. Typically, Kaps describes the list in a more esoteric way: "The original list we discussed with investors had seven points. We like seven, it's an evil number."
Negotiations to secure the plant and machinery were time consuming. Beginning after the meeting between Bosman and Kaps on June 14, 2008, they stretched to October 2008. In the meantime, Polaroid went through a period of extreme upheaval when Tom Petters was arrested by the FBI, accused of involvement in a $100 million investment fraud. The case is ongoing.
On October 8, 2008, The Impossible Project was founded as a legal entity. By January 2009, a team of ten had begun work. Now 15 are involved.
The black-and-white integral film will go on sale in early 2010 at a predicted price of eight shots for £15 - and the team has already moved on to its next challenge: colour film. Where black-and-white film needs four layers, colour requires at least 15. Colour instant film needs specific silver- halide compounds which react to each colour - blue sensitive, green sensitive and red sensitive. With each you then need a complementary dye - blue needs yellow, green needs magenta and red needs cyan.
Mixing those six layers creates an additional problem.
Inter-layers are required to stop each colour layer from interfering with and influencing the others. In addition, a sealing top coat is required. "It's so much more complicated," says Steinmeijer with a resigned shrug. "If a picture is too blue, simply adding more yellow dye will always have an additional and often unwanted effect."
Henk Minnen, a quiet, grey-haired ex-merchant seaman, worked at Polaroid for 34 years. He's in charge of developing new materials.
In another part of the lab, he spreads sheets of red foil and off-white masking. These create the bag that contains the reagent, a mix of chemicals that begins the development.
The mask, the iconic white frame that makes a Polaroid instant shot unmistakable, is metallised and has to be heat- and friction-resistant to withstand the force of the camera's rollers.
Finding a supplier capable of producing such a specialised material was challenging but The Impossible Project settled on a British firm, Harman, via its Ilford Photo subsidiary. It's also charged with producing the negatives for the new film stock.
Despite standing still for almost a year, the vast machines that will produce The Impossible Project's film needed only minor maintenance-just a few parts rusted by moisture in the cold factory needed replacing. Paul Latka, a machine operator before he joined Polaroid's IT department, has partially returned to his old role. "It had been about 12 years since I last operated a machine," he says.
The process of producing a pack of instant film, he explains, involves "outside work" and "inside work". "On the inside you have the negative room, where it's completely dark. The first time you are taught to use a machine you see it in the light, but after that you find all the controls in the dark." From the negative room, the materials move to the work section where they come together and are melted into a complete pod. Then the frame is added and the assembly goes to the pack section. At the outside pack section, the spring, battery and outer shell are added before the pack goes back into the dark section of the machine and is loaded with eight frames. After being sealed to ensure it's light-tight, it's packaged up for shipping.
Although the creation of the film packs is the culmination of an extremely precise engineering process, the quality of print will be the product of feel rather than science. "I don't know if I want a perfect picture," Kaps says. "I prefer a changing, thrilling picture." "For many years I was a quality manager," Bosman says. "Polaroid measured the numbers but we'd take a whole picture series of test shots and see what looked right. There is a personal judgment involved in what looks right, although people tend to agree on certain colours. Cyan and magenta are not usually favoured, while reddish and yellow tones are usually fine."
The preference for colour tones in Polaroid pictures is not only personal but cultural. At one time, Polaroid had different machines producing different formulations to account for regional preferences. "A blueish tint on people's faces makes them look like chickens in a freezer," says Bosman. "But if you ship film to Japan, looking reddish suggests you're drunk, so they prefer skin tones to look more blue than red."
The project has also secured the services of other Polaroid alumni, including Paul Giambarba, creator of the original Polaroid packaging and branding, who will produce the new packs; and Henny Waanders, a former head camera designer for the firm, who will help to design the new camera.
Kaps met Giambarba, who blogs about the evolution of Polaroid's original branding, and solicited his help. "I thought it would be nice if the guy who developed the first packaging could contribute," he says. Giambarba had worked with Edwin Land ("a tricky customer") and was intrigued: "I knew I could tackle the packaging. It's good to be back in the saddle after all these years!" Waanders has begun work on the prototype for the new camera - a modern Polaroid film-dispenser unit grafted on to the quality lens and mechanism of a Polaroid SX-70 camera.
Part of Kaps's dream is to produce a new instant camera to go with a new film. He expects this in the second half of 2010, and aims to make it "a modern camera. Nice to touch - and thrilling to use."
Following the launch of black-and-white film, colour is due later next year. And the new licencees of the Polaroid brand are getting back on board. In mid-2010 the Summit Global Group will reproduce several classic Polaroid cameras - all using a limited-edition Polaroid- branded film made by the Impossible Project. It's exciting news, but Kaps keeps things in perspective. "We're starting our own brand with our own products," he says. "What we call them is important - it's like having a baby. You need to give it a name. Once we've got the name, we can start building the family."
One challenge remains. Can they make instant-photography products pay? Kaps estimates that there are 300 million Polaroid cameras in circulation, but Polaroid's figures suggest that in their lifetimes most consume between only three and five packs of film. This time, Kaps believes, it will be different. His Pola Premium online store is selling between 30,000 and 50,000 film packages a year. "This is no longer a mass-market product," he says. "Our customers are buying film from us online at an average of ten packs per year. It's something you're into and celebrate."
*Mic Wright is a freelance journalist and pop-culture blogger at brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com.
Learn more about The Impossible Project at the-impossible-project.com.*
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
