2 posts tagged “photojournalist”
Polaroid film faces the final shutter
By Justin Baer in New York
Published: February 8 2008 23:48 | Last updated: February 8 2008 23:48
Polaroid, the US company that introduced instant photography 60 years ago, is to stop making film.
The group, which stopped making instant cameras a year ago, will now complete its transition to digital printers, televisions and DVD players by shutting four analogue film factories.
Polaroid cameras and the white-bordered prints they produced were common at family reunions and crime scenes alike for decades, reaching peak popularity during the 1960s and 1970s. They would also become a medium of choice for artists such as Ansel Adams, David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg.
The advent of digital technology has pushed Eastman Kodak and other veteran manufacturers to abandon film production in recent years. Soon after Polaroid was sold to private investment firm Petters Group in 2005, the management started its own gradual retreat from analogue photography.
Polaroid will close two factories in Massachusetts as well as facilities in Mexico and the Netherlands, eliminating about 450 jobs. The company plans to make enough film to last customers until next year, Thomas Beaudoin, chief operating officer, said.
He said Polaroid’s consumer-electronics business generated almost $1bn in revenue. The company had high hopes for its battery-powered digital printers, and was in talks with mobile-phone carriers and other potential business partners.
He saw this transition as the start of a third era for Polaroid, which existed for its first few decades primarily as a maker of sunglasses and protective goggles for the US military.
Polaroid sold its eyecare division last year.
The company expects its mobile printers to attract even some of the most devout fans of instant photography. But for those unmoved by the technology, there is a chance another manufacturer will produce the film elsewhere.
Mr Beaudoin said: “We’re working very hard to find some alternatives with people who might be able to take the recipe.
“We can’t promise anything.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
FT.com / Companies / Consumer industries - Polaroid film faces the final shutter
Some of these images are very graphic and caution is advised
Out of Africa
February 9th, 2008, filed by David Viggers
I’ve been trying to write about some sport images that caught my eye while trawling through the Reuters file but I keep getting hung up on our pictures from Kenya.
They are so raw, so powerful and uncompromising that even the most accomplished images of cossetted sportsmen performing in completely controlled circumstances seem insignificant in comparison.
George Philipas
What they portray is just hellish - a pile of charred bodies in a church, a young mother lying dead in her home while her distressed toddler wails unattended, a bright-eyed teenage boy with the shaft of an arrow sticking out of his head.
People, dirt poor inflicting unimaginable cruelty and suffering on other equally poor people, the motivation for it really doesn’t matter, it is an appalling human tragedy.
Peter Andrews
When I was a kid I remember a truly shocking Oxfam poster with an image of a starving Biafran child, huge wide eyes, tormented by flies, stick thin and with an impossibly distended belly.
In the intervening period the image of a shocked, wide-eyed innocent has become an overused cypher for suffering in every subsequent African disaster, natural or otherwise, but there is nothing innocent about the look in this child’s eyes, rather there is mistrust and deep, deep hurt.
Given the scenes of mayhem which preceded it I was surprised to find this quiet image and amazed by the potency of the simple gesture of affection. I’ll get back to the sport pictures.
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