Polaroid, Old Style

 

This reminds me.  I need to go to the camera store and buy some Polaroid film.  I wish Impossible Project hadn't stopped making Spectra film.  I liked that format.  Anyway, this really is an old-style Polaroid film that required a paper cover to be peeled off the image to complete processing. I'm fairly certain this is a Polaroid Series 20 film, made for the Swinger camera model made between 1965 and 1970.  Of course, the film packs were manufactured long after the Swinger went out of production, so this photo could have been taken after 1970, but the well-groomed hippie beard on dad screams 1960s.  

Desperately Finding Susan

 

Does anyone out there get the movie reference, or is it too old?  Anyway, I've written about this before.  If the title of this blog were 100% honest, it would be Recently Purchased Photography.  Almost every picture I post was bought somewhere. Flea markets, antique stores, thrift shops and on-line.  This photo is that rare exception, a true found photograph.  I was walking around L.A., there was a box full of books on the sidewalk.  "Free Books" written on the side of the box.  I started thumbing through some of the books, and I found this Fuji Instax wide photo of Susan who is fresh off of something. 

Early Polaroids

I admit that these aren't the most interesting photos in the collection, but I bought them because they are early Polaroids and a bit of history.   I found them in the same box, and while I can't be sure, my bet is that they are related in ways beyond technology.   The bespectacled girl in the second photo looks like she could be an older version of the girl in the top photo.  In any case, there's a similar chin shape.   As far as dating goes, these are from the peel the paper era of Polaroid film packs, which dates the camera from the mid fifties to the early sixties.  Of course, the actual film was manufactured far latter than that.

Here's a fun fact.  The peel the paper Polaroids actually had a negative.  When I worked at the photo lab, one of our customers brought in a huge bag of old Polaroid paper backings.  We soaked them in photo-flo, separated the film negative from the paper, and made conventional photographic enlargements from those negatives.  So, if you ever get a chance to go through your parents (or grandparents) old stuff, and find envelopes full of old Polaroid paper backings, you may have a treasure trove of old images.  Just remember, Polaroids were expensive cameras, and people often spent the extra money so they could make photos that they didn't want the local photo finisher to see.