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"  Photo: Princeton Architectural Press  With some believing that Instagram has overtaken Twitter in popularity, it seems that instant photography is having a major moment. In his new book Instant: The Story of Polaroid ($24.95), Christopher Bonanos details the rise and fall of Polaroid from 1948 to its second bankruptcy in 2009, discovering a cult-like following for the iconic instant photography brand along the way. ELLE.com quizzed the photo expert all about his book and the movement to bring back the Polaroid. Elle: When did you start thinking about a book like this? Christopher Bonanos: When Polaroid got out of the film business in 2008, I wrote a little story for New York on a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Robert Mapplethorpe&amp;#039;s Polaroids. I called up a few fine artists like, Chuck Close and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, and found they were not sad or nostalgic, they were angry. There was a site called SavePolaroid.com, where I discovered the cult of Polaroid. There was a movement to keep Polaroid from going away. One website led to another, and that led me down the rabbit hole. Three years later, I had a book. Elle: Did you know anything about Polaroid before you started? CB: Some. I had caught the bug myself when I was a teenager. When I was about 14, I found an old, old Polaroid camera from the 1950s in a junk shop. It was marked five bucks, I talked them down to three. I took it home and bought film that turned out to be the wrong size. Elle: Do you still have it? CB: Yes. It takes Polaroid roll film, which was discontinued in 1992. So I don&amp;#039;t use it much. But it&amp;#039;s next to my desk. Elle: Do you have a collection of Polaroid cameras?  CB: I do. For some of the photographs in the book, it was practical to buy the cameras and have them photographed. But I have a few that just interest me. People find them in their closets and mail them to me. They&amp;#039;re nice design objects, and even if you&amp;#039;re not using them, they&amp;#039;re pleasant to hold and goof around with. They&amp;#039;re great props, too. On Mad Men, Lee Garner, Jr., the Lucky Strike guy, got one for Christmas. That was an expensive Christmas gift. Elle: How does Instagram compare to Polaroid? CB: The striking thing to me is that people use them the exact the same way. It&amp;#039;s people sitting around on the porch, eating, drinking, and being casual. You didn&amp;#039;t use [Polaroids] the way you used a medium-format camera in the studio or even on the street. Instagram is most definitely an heir to Polaroid.\u2028 Elle: Why did people start shaking their Polaroid pictures? CB: The first black and white Polaroid film was unstable and started to fade. If you&amp;#039;re recording baby&amp;#039;s first Christmas and those pictures are gone by the Fourth of July, then you are in real trouble, especially because Polaroid, in its early days, was perceived as a little bit gimmicky. So Polaroid created a film coater that came with each box of film. After your picture came out of the camera, you took out the swab and painted it with this goop, it was messy and clumsy but it worked; it sealed up the picture and stopped it from fading. But your picture was really wet for the next 15 minutes, so people would wave them in the air to dry them. Since the &amp;#039;70s, most Polaroids have not required a coater and come out dry, so there&amp;#039;s no reason to shake now. It&amp;#039;s a ghost in the machine from 60 years ago.  Elle: Can you break down very concisely why Polaroid went bust? CB: In the late &amp;#039;70s and early &amp;#039;80s it knew digital was coming, and research was being developed for that and an inkjet printer. Both got scratched along the way. In the case of the digital camera, it was mostly fear. Polaroid made most of its money from film sales. Camera sales were a small part of the business, relatively speaking, because it sells a camera once and film for years afterward; anything that would cut into film sales made it a little fearful. Elle: Polaroid is back now, right? CB: Yes, after the second bankruptcy in 2009 it was sold by the court to two venture capital companies called Hilco and Gordon Brothers. They introduced a digital camera with a little printer underneath and a small wireless digital printer that you can carry in your pocket.  Elle: But The Impossible Project [a group of former Polaroid employees who took over the last Polaroid factory] are the ones who are doing the &amp;quot;true Polaroid&amp;quot; thing, right? CB: They&amp;#039;re carrying the fire for analog. They certainly have passion for the old form. They sell vintage, refurbished Polaroid cameras, and they have their own camera on the way. They finally introduced a new film last month that looks and feels a lot like Polaroid 600 film. It&amp;#039;s slower to develop, you have to wait about 20 minutes for the picture to come up, but it works well.  Elle: The reaction to the book so far has been great. Did you expect people to like it so much? CB: I knew there was a Polaroid cult with a certain passion, but I didn&amp;#039;t realize how much. I think that has grown in the past couple of years. When the film went away and things like Instagram started to come around, people realized that they missed it. What&amp;#039;s that Joni Mitchell line, &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t know what you&amp;#039;ve got &amp;#039;till it&amp;#039;s gone?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a little true. Elle: Is the book going to be in Urban Outfitters? CB: Yes; I am delighted they are taking it. And it sells instant cameras!   Photo: Princeton Architectural Press   Photo: John Reuter   Photo: Danny Kim  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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