27 September, 2017
Impossible Project, the company that revived production of Polaroid film in 2008, is rebranding as Polaroid Originals, and launching a new analogue instant camera, the Polaroid OneStep 2
Ten years after Polaroid stopped making instant film cameras, and nine years after it stopped making the film those cameras use, the Polaroid instant camera is back — well, kind of. Announced today, the new $99 Polaroid Originals OneStep 2 is not made by Polaroid, if only because Polaroid largely exists these days as a brand and a nebulous collection of patents and intellectual property. Instead, the new camera is being made by the Impossible Project, the very company that spawned out of the groundswell effort to preserve Polaroid’s film in the first place.
“Polaroid was so fastidious with their record keeping,” he says. “There’s a wonderful archive in Boston at Harvard. We had the chance, myself and another colleague, to go there and spend three or four days digging through the whole archive. Really with the goal to understand visually, first of all, what Polaroid was, what it used to be, how it used to communicate.
“So we came at it from a traditional graphic design perspective and then also to try and get a feeling for some of the values that were originally behind the brand that made it so great. It was incredible instructive for the process really, because they’ve got such a rich visual history.”
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