The Polaroid Project
Impossible made Possible
‘Don’t undertake a project unless it’s manifestly important and nearly impossible,’ said Edwin Land, Polaroid’s inventor. When Polaroid’s doors were closed last year these words spurred the factory workers in Enschede to keep the production lines intact and under one roof. They called their mission ‘The Impossible Project’ and spread the word in the hope that someone with a kind heart and a bit of cash would keep the cogs turning. Fast forward a few months and ‘The Impossible Project’ was made possible thanks to Urban Outfitters, where you can now head to restock on Polaroid film and cameras.
In celebration of this new generation, we bagged ten cameras before they hit the shelves and passed them on to ten of our favourite, pioneering creatives and asked them to shoot one film each of whatever they chose. The results are mixed, grainy, blurred, brilliant and haphazard in places, but each of the photographs has the essence of what makes Polaroid so beloved. As one of our ten creatives so perfectly put it: “it’s the instant capturing that feels so much more real than getting a film processed, it’s capturing proper moments in time.’
