Polaroid UK May Have A Brighter Future

It’s complicated.

Polaroid Inc was bought by Tom Petters in 2005. He was convicted earlier this year of operating a Ponzi scheme, and was said to have bought the Polaroid company using fraudulently obtained money. As a result, the assets of Polaroid Inc were ordered to be put up for auction and sold.

The first of four auctions of famous Polaroid photographs took place in Sotheby’s in June this year in New York.

If you were there, you could have bid on polaroid photographs taken by Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chuck Close, and others.

Not everyone agrees that the polaroid photos belonged to the Polaroid company. Some say the artist-photographers had left them with the Polaroid company on extended loan. I don’t suppose we have heard all there is to be said and done on that argument.

Out of this debacle (I call the end of Polaroid a debacle because of the sad end to a company that was started by the genius Edwin Land), has risen a new Polaroid company.

Polaroid USA seems to have restricted its instant offerings to the low end of the market. Take a look for yourself and judge.

Then there is Polaroid UK.

A couple of big guns formerly employed by Olympus are to take command at Summit Global Group (the owner of the Polaroid licence) to run the new Polaroid UK. What will they sell?

Did you hang on to your Polaroid camera?

The Land List is a great resource for everything Polaroid. If you want to know which film goes with which camera, which camera has a glass lens, and a myriad of other information about Polaroid cameras – this is the site to find all this information. It’s been running for years and it is real labor of love.

You can also find more articles here on Photograph Works about Polaroid here and about the Polaroid PoGo, here.

To keep up with the latest in what is happening with Polaroid, I recommend The Impossible Project, which has set out to produce new, instant film materials for classic Polaroid cameras. If you are interested, they also sell classic Polaroid cameras that have been refurbished. I just clicked on their camera section and everything is ‘out of stock’ at the moment, so I guess the demand is there.

Tagged as: Polaroid