Word: polaroiding
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...attending the factory's closing ceremony had other ideas. Florian Kaps, an Austrian entrepreneur and Polaroid enthusiast, and André Bosman, until then the engineering manager of the Enschede plant, met by chance on that fateful day. Together they decided to find a way to bring instant photography back to life. (See "Who We Were: America in Snapshots...
...First he worked as an executive with the Lomographical Society, founded in Vienna in 1992 to celebrate the Russian Lomo camera, a very basic snapper that conquered some bohemian corners of the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, four years ago, Kaps fell in love with Polaroid and founded a company specializing in selling equipment for analog instant photography. An official partner of Polaroid, the company still operates via the website Polapremium.com, where enthusiasts can buy the camera, related equipment and some of the remaining film stock. (See pictures of historical photos on Google Earth...
...October 2008, Kaps, 39, and Bosman, 55, took $2.6 million in private capital and started what they endearingly called the Impossible Project, with a view to reinventing the traditional Polaroid film. They founded a company named Impossible, leased a small building on the site of the closed Enschede plant, secured some key production machinery and hired nine former Polaroid employees to come up with new formulas for both a monochrome and a color version of the instant film. The new films would have unique characteristics but still maintain some of the best bits of Polaroid, like the square shape...
...Still in the experimental stage, Impossible's instant pictures have a look that's reminiscent of the early days of photography, "but this will be part of their charm," says Kaps. While the company is still in negotiations with Polaroid over the use of the Polaroid name, it has been given permission to make film that will work in Polaroid cameras. The trial monochrome version of the film will go into production at the end of October and, if all goes according to plan, should be available to the masses in time for Christmas, "before people start to throw away...
...Building on his growing empire - Kaps also runs Polanoid.net, the Web's biggest Polaroid community, and the Polanoir gallery Polanoir.com in Vienna - Kaps is hoping a new instant camera will go on the market in 2010, to be built by a partner company (he won't reveal which just yet). "It will be high quality rather than a mass product, with a good lens and manual focusing," he says...