Portraits of a Lady
by Gigi Anders
MARCH 20, 2008 TAGS:
Illustrations by Jorge Naranjo
First the camera, now the film. The Polaroid Corporation, which stopped making consumer cameras last year, decided in early February to discontinue making its magical instant film, too. There’s just enough to last through 2009; after that they’re hoping to license it out to other manufacturers for diehard instant lovers like the ones on www.savepolaroid.com.
Blame digital cameras and cell phones for Polaroid’s end. Actually, the death knell began tolling back in 2001, when the company filed for bankruptcy. Though it was acquired in 2005 by a private investment group, alas, here we are. The company that commenced in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientists and the military introduced its first self-developing 60-second camera in 1948, the same year Gandhi was murdered, Velcro was invented, and Israel was declared an independent state. The Land Camera cost $89.75.
Thank Edwin Herbert Land for your instant gratification. Born in 1909 in Norwich, Conn., to Martha and Harry Land — Harry ran a scrap metal and salvage business — Edwin Land was the grandson and son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa in the Ukraine. Land, who believed “you always start with a fantasy,” dropped out of Harvard after freshman year, where he’d studied physics and chemistry, married Helen Maislen in 1929, and partnered with one of his instructors, George Wheelwright III, to create the Polaroid Corporation. In 1943, during a family vacation in New Mexico, Land’s 3-year-old daughter, Jennifer, asked why she couldn’t see the picture he’d just taken of her on that sunny day.
“Stimulated by the dangerously invigorating plateau air of Santa Fe,” Land recalled, he fantasized about creating something perfect, immediate, intuitive, and massive. With Ansel Adams advising him, Land wanted to create a camera “that’s part of you, that’s always with you . . . it would enlarge [amateurs’] horizons” by [providing] “a feeling of personal identification with the world in the way that photography has always hoped to do.”
Through experimentation, Land made Jennifer’s wish a brown and sepia-printed reality for her and the rest of the planet with the instant camera. Black-and-white and color film followed. By the ’60s, sales of Polaroid cameras — especially the cute, cheap, hip one called The Swinger — and film were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As Land, who died in Cambridge, Mass., in 1991, was fond of saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”
How many instant pictures have been snapped in the past 60 years? Can anyone ever really know? I know I contributed 30 naughty ones to that tally more than 30 years ago on my maiden Polaroid voyage. If the purpose of a camera is to capture a memory, then this is mine:
When I was a college freshman, I was madly in love with a senior named Timothy who was in my Modern European Poetry class. I’d spend most of the period staring at his long, disheveled, wavy black hair. It parted haphazardly down the middle and shone like wet indigo ink under the overhead fluorescent lights. Timothy, whose father was Irish and whose mother was English, used words like “intimate” as a noun, and he knew what “cauchemar” meant (“nightmare” in French). He loved T.S. Eliot and could recite by heart his favorite poem, “Portrait of a Lady,” pronouncing “cauchemar” correctly. After class we’d go out for coffee and cigarettes and talk for hours. I was very young, just 17, and looked up to this worldly, older man of 21 who was self-possessed and poetic, mature and substantive. With his high forehead, milky skin, strong jaw, and piercing blue eyes he looked like an intellectual carpenter or an aspiring novelist who lived in an Alphabet City garret.
I romanticized him, but Timothy took my ardor in stride. Time was of the essence, though. After graduation he was going abroad, perhaps never to return. So turning to T.S. Eliot for help, one day after class I read “Portrait of a Lady” aloud to Timothy, hoping to elicit something passionate:
“‘You do not know . . . how rare and strange it is . . . To find a friend . . . Who has and gives/Those qualities upon which friendship lives./How much it means that I say this to you — /Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!’”
“I’m glad I know you too,” Timothy said, gently squeezing and releasing my forearm.
OK, this situation called for heavier artillery. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, n’est-ce-pas? I got my gay friend, Rob, to shoot 30 Polaroid snapshots of me (that’s three packs, 10 prints in each) posing suggestively — an inexperienced teenager’s idea of “suggestively” — in black lace lingerie. We used his sister’s Swinger and I bought the film and we did the photo shoot in my bedroom one afternoon while my parents were at work. It was exciting, the whole click-click-click-click process. Dangerous. But safe too, because we didn't have to have the film processed at a drugstore, which might get us busted for porn. No, it was happening right there, mysteriously developing before my eyes in chemical enchantment. I was coming into focus, emerging as a woman instead of a girl.
I regarded image after image of myself en déshabillée and wrapped the seven I liked best in red satin ribbon, placed the tidy stack in an empty cardboard jewelry box cushioned in cotton, and labeled the cover “Portraits of a Lady.” Since the lady in the poem has lilacs in her room, I bought a fragrant purple lilac and tucked it, along with “Portraits,” in a gift bag for a surprise.
After class Timothy and I sat on a bench. I proffered the bag, heart banging.
“For you,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling and a little bemused. “What’s the occasion?”
I shrugged.
“Lilacs,” he said, holding the stalk to his nose and then to mine. “Mmm, it’s wonderful. Thank you. I thought the classroom smelled like flowers. I thought maybe it was you.” How, how, how can a man say such things and not want to, I don’t know, embrace?
“‘Portraits of a Lady’? What is this?”
“Open it,” I said.
“Oh wow,” he said, looking at the first shot and then the next and the next. “This is you? You’re . . . beautiful.”
“I really like you, Timothy,” I said. “I did this for you.”
“These pictures are lovely, love,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. The cheek. “Thank you. I’ll cherish them always.”
“Why don’t you want to be with me?” I said.
“I’m leaving America, you know,” he said. “And you’re, what, 17?”
“I don’t understand.”
He took me in his arms and kissed me. Really kissed me.
“You’re 17,” he said. “A magnificent baby.”
“Not in those Polaroids, I’m not,” I said.
“A magnificent baby,” he reiterated.
“You don’t take me seriously.”
“You’re so young,” he said, stroking my cheek as I blinked back tears. “There’s so much to learn. You’ll have many, many lovers in your life. Just give it time. You’ll see.”
Timothy moved to Europe. We corresponded for a while, then lost touch. But somewhere in some English or Irish or French attic, I know my Polaroid portraits are still there. A little dusty, maybe, a little faded. But still shining, still smiling in sheer black lace in the dark.
First the camera, now the film. The Polaroid Corporation, which stopped making consumer cameras last year, decided in early February to discontinue making its magical instant film, too. There’s just enough to last through 2009; after that they’re hoping to license it out to other manufacturers for diehard instant lovers like the ones on www.savepolaroid.com.
Blame digital cameras and cell phones for Polaroid’s end. Actually, the death knell began tolling back in 2001, when the company filed for bankruptcy. Though it was acquired in 2005 by a private investment group, alas, here we are. The company that commenced in 1937 making polarized lenses for scientists and the military introduced its first self-developing 60-second camera in 1948, the same year Gandhi was murdered, Velcro was invented, and Israel was declared an independent state. The Land Camera cost $89.75.
Thank Edwin Herbert Land for your instant gratification. Born in 1909 in Norwich, Conn., to Martha and Harry Land — Harry ran a scrap metal and salvage business — Edwin Land was the grandson and son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa in the Ukraine. Land, who believed “you always start with a fantasy,” dropped out of Harvard after freshman year, where he’d studied physics and chemistry, married Helen Maislen in 1929, and partnered with one of his instructors, George Wheelwright III, to create the Polaroid Corporation. In 1943, during a family vacation in New Mexico, Land’s 3-year-old daughter, Jennifer, asked why she couldn’t see the picture he’d just taken of her on that sunny day.
“Stimulated by the dangerously invigorating plateau air of Santa Fe,” Land recalled, he fantasized about creating something perfect, immediate, intuitive, and massive. With Ansel Adams advising him, Land wanted to create a camera “that’s part of you, that’s always with you . . . it would enlarge [amateurs’] horizons” by [providing] “a feeling of personal identification with the world in the way that photography has always hoped to do.”
Through experimentation, Land made Jennifer’s wish a brown and sepia-printed reality for her and the rest of the planet with the instant camera. Black-and-white and color film followed. By the ’60s, sales of Polaroid cameras — especially the cute, cheap, hip one called The Swinger — and film were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As Land, who died in Cambridge, Mass., in 1991, was fond of saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”
How many instant pictures have been snapped in the past 60 years? Can anyone ever really know? I know I contributed 30 naughty ones to that tally more than 30 years ago on my maiden Polaroid voyage. If the purpose of a camera is to capture a memory, then this is mine:
When I was a college freshman, I was madly in love with a senior named Timothy who was in my Modern European Poetry class. I’d spend most of the period staring at his long, disheveled, wavy black hair. It parted haphazardly down the middle and shone like wet indigo ink under the overhead fluorescent lights. Timothy, whose father was Irish and whose mother was English, used words like “intimate” as a noun, and he knew what “cauchemar” meant (“nightmare” in French). He loved T.S. Eliot and could recite by heart his favorite poem, “Portrait of a Lady,” pronouncing “cauchemar” correctly. After class we’d go out for coffee and cigarettes and talk for hours. I was very young, just 17, and looked up to this worldly, older man of 21 who was self-possessed and poetic, mature and substantive. With his high forehead, milky skin, strong jaw, and piercing blue eyes he looked like an intellectual carpenter or an aspiring novelist who lived in an Alphabet City garret.
I romanticized him, but Timothy took my ardor in stride. Time was of the essence, though. After graduation he was going abroad, perhaps never to return. So turning to T.S. Eliot for help, one day after class I read “Portrait of a Lady” aloud to Timothy, hoping to elicit something passionate:“‘You do not know . . . how rare and strange it is . . . To find a friend . . . Who has and gives/Those qualities upon which friendship lives./How much it means that I say this to you — /Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!’”
“I’m glad I know you too,” Timothy said, gently squeezing and releasing my forearm.
OK, this situation called for heavier artillery. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, n’est-ce-pas? I got my gay friend, Rob, to shoot 30 Polaroid snapshots of me (that’s three packs, 10 prints in each) posing suggestively — an inexperienced teenager’s idea of “suggestively” — in black lace lingerie. We used his sister’s Swinger and I bought the film and we did the photo shoot in my bedroom one afternoon while my parents were at work. It was exciting, the whole click-click-click-click process. Dangerous. But safe too, because we didn't have to have the film processed at a drugstore, which might get us busted for porn. No, it was happening right there, mysteriously developing before my eyes in chemical enchantment. I was coming into focus, emerging as a woman instead of a girl.
I regarded image after image of myself en déshabillée and wrapped the seven I liked best in red satin ribbon, placed the tidy stack in an empty cardboard jewelry box cushioned in cotton, and labeled the cover “Portraits of a Lady.” Since the lady in the poem has lilacs in her room, I bought a fragrant purple lilac and tucked it, along with “Portraits,” in a gift bag for a surprise.
After class Timothy and I sat on a bench. I proffered the bag, heart banging.
“For you,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling and a little bemused. “What’s the occasion?”
I shrugged.
“Lilacs,” he said, holding the stalk to his nose and then to mine. “Mmm, it’s wonderful. Thank you. I thought the classroom smelled like flowers. I thought maybe it was you.” How, how, how can a man say such things and not want to, I don’t know, embrace?
“‘Portraits of a Lady’? What is this?”
“Open it,” I said.
“Oh wow,” he said, looking at the first shot and then the next and the next. “This is you? You’re . . . beautiful.”
“I really like you, Timothy,” I said. “I did this for you.”
“These pictures are lovely, love,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. The cheek. “Thank you. I’ll cherish them always.”
“Why don’t you want to be with me?” I said.
“I’m leaving America, you know,” he said. “And you’re, what, 17?”
“I don’t understand.”
He took me in his arms and kissed me. Really kissed me.
“You’re 17,” he said. “A magnificent baby.”
“Not in those Polaroids, I’m not,” I said.
“A magnificent baby,” he reiterated.
“You don’t take me seriously.”
“You’re so young,” he said, stroking my cheek as I blinked back tears. “There’s so much to learn. You’ll have many, many lovers in your life. Just give it time. You’ll see.”
Timothy moved to Europe. We corresponded for a while, then lost touch. But somewhere in some English or Irish or French attic, I know my Polaroid portraits are still there. A little dusty, maybe, a little faded. But still shining, still smiling in sheer black lace in the dark.
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John D wrote on March 21, 2008 6:08pm
'Great story, we all have had a teenage crush. I wonder if there'll ever be another camera like it, where you get instant gratification in your hand, not just for a few seconds in a digital camera viewer, until it finds its way to the poor quality laser printer.' [Report Comment]
