(Today, a single box of film from the last batch - now several years past its use-by date, and of iffy reliability - can top $200 on eBay.) The product seemed irreproducible, and certainly nobody was going to start making it again. The remaining people using it - the holdouts, who were the most enthusiastic about this analog way of making pictures - were, as you usually hear in these situations, devastated. That shift, of course, was what finished off Type 55, and Polaroid film in general: Production ceased in 2009.
It looked extremely non-digital, that was for sure. Its pictures are instantly recognizable by an odd perforated border that (as the years went on) many people began to leave on the print for its ring of authenticity, particularly as the digital age began to arrive. Literally thousands of other great photographers, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Edward Burtynsky, adopted it too. Type 55 was never a high-volume product, but Adams used it for the rest of his life, using it to make some of his greatest photos, including El Capitan, Winter, Sunrise, Yosemite National Park, California, from 1968. Suddenly, and for the first time, you could be a serious photographer without a darkroom. It was a four-by-five-inch packet of film that fit in any view camera - the big old-fashioned wooden kind Adams used, with the cloth that flipped over the back of the photographer’s head - and it could be processed on the spot in 30 seconds or so. So his request was simple: How about an instant film that also produced a real, high-quality, reuseable negative? He asked the question of Edwin Land, Polaroid’s founder and creative force, and in 1961, he got his wish, under the bare-bones name of Type 55. Like nearly all photographers, though, Adams used conventional black-and-white film, not Polaroid, for his major work. He loved instant film: If you were up in the mountains or out in the desert, how else would you know if you got your shot? He’d taken his consulting job seriously, too, shooting pictures all over the world and sending the results back to Polaroid’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with technical notes scribbled all over their white borders. For the past several years, he’d been a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation, testing and analyzing the company’s new film and cameras. In the mid-1950s, Ansel Adams was perhaps the most famous photographer alive, and he had a request.
Shot on Polaroid’s now-discontinued Type 55 film, by Joshua Black Wilkins.