May 7, 2008

Newsmagazines seem to be withering, like curled-up husks. Picture magazines have been replaced by tabloid-types, all gossip-pocked. (Even overseas, formerly vital titles like Paris Match are on a Bruni binge, ruled by the steady flow of fashion shows, galas and bashes, and celebrity snaps.) And now that staple of the professional portrait photographer – Polaroid film – is packing it in. By year’s end, the once-magical formerly “instant” medium (pre-cursor to digital’s perpetually “instant” medium) will have gone the way of the Packard.

New York magazine this week parades out an impressive cordon of mourners: artist-photographer Chuck Close, photographer-filmmaker Timothy-Greenfield Sanders, filmmaker-provocateur John Waters. Says Sylvia Wolf, curator of the new Whitney show, “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe”: “There’s a sexiness and titillation to the instant process." Adds Waters, “Now what the hell am I supposed to do? Digital isn’t instant gratification, and those cameras don’t make that sexy sound.”

But what good is a stodgy old Polaroid when photographer and subject can pre-view pictures right there on a digital camera back?

Woe is Po.

Or, as Poe might have put it, “Quoth the dodo, ‘Nevermore.’”