Contemporary Authors

• Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History Macmillan (Basingstoke, England), 1999
• Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama Manchester University Press/Palgrave (New York, NY), 2001
• The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People Cultural Resources 2002
• Benjamin’s Arcades: An Unguided Tour Manchester University Press (New York, NY), 2005
• The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia Manchester University Press (New York, NY), 2012

1. The Polaroid Project : at the intersection of art and technology LCCN 2017005471 Type of material Book Main title The Polaroid Project : at the intersection of art and technology / [contributed by] William A. Ewing, Barbara P. Hitchcock, Deborah G. Douglas, Gary van Zante, Rebekka Reuter, Christopher Bonanos, Peter Buse, Dennis Jelonnek, John Rohrbach. Published/Produced Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] ©2017 Projected pub date 1706 Description pages cm ISBN 9780520296169 (cloth) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The camera does the rest : how Polaroid changed photography LCCN 2015024891 Type of material Book Personal name Buse, Peter, 1970- author. Main title The camera does the rest : how Polaroid changed photography / Peter Buse. Published/Produced Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2016] Description xiii, 308 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780226176383 (cloth : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 135325 CALL NUMBER TR269 .B87 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. The Polaroid years : instant photography and experimentation. LCCN 2012043171 Type of material Book Main title The Polaroid years : instant photography and experimentation. Published/Produced Munich : DelMonico books, Prestel, [2013] ©2013 Description 224 pages : mostly colored illustrations ; 28 cm ISBN 9783791352640 (hardcover) Shelf Location FLM2016 092990 CALL NUMBER TR269 .P656 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia LCCN 2012533841 Type of material Book Personal name Buse, Peter, 1970- Main title The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia / Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis. Edition Paperback edition. Published/Produced Manchester, UK ; New York : Manchester University Press, 2012. Description viii, 210 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780719071379 (softcover) 0719071372 (softcover) Shelf Location FLS2014 024045 CALL NUMBER PN1998.3.I29 B87 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 5. Drama + theory : critical approaches to modern British drama LCCN 2001044923 Type of material Book Personal name Buse, Peter, 1970- Main title Drama + theory : critical approaches to modern British drama / Peter Buse. Published/Created Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the U.S.A. by Palgrave, 2001. Description xi, 204 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0719057213 (hardback) 0719057221 (pbk.) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/hol058/2001044923.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/hol052/2001044923.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/hol051/2001044923.html Shelf Location FLM2015 007930 CALL NUMBER PR736 .B88 2001 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Kingston University - http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/faculty/staff/cv.php?staffnum=839

  Prof Peter Buse

  Position: Research And Enterprise
  School: Faculty Of Arts & Social Sciences
  Email: P.Buse@kingston.ac.uk
  Extension: 67346
  Location: Room PR EM 3039, Eadweard Muybridge, Penrhyn Road
  Profile

  I'm currently Associate Dean for Research, Arts and Social Sciences, a post I took up in May 2016, after originally joining Kingston in 2013 as Head of School of Performance and Screen Studies. I was formerly Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Salford, and before that (long before) completed my MA and PhD at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University and my BA at the University of Alberta, Canada. I'm the author, most recently, of The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography, a media archaeology of instant photography. My other current interests include psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), comedy, and periodicals (journals, magazines), especially the relations between the first and the other two. I'm an Executive Member of the European Society for Periodical Research and reviews editor of New Formations.

  Books
  • The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)
  • With Nuria-Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester UP, 2007).
  • With Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken and Bertrand Taithe, Benjamin’s Arcades: an unGuided tour. (Manchester UP, 2005)
  • Ed., Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, e-book (Cultural Resources: 2002)
  • Drama plus theory: Critical approaches to modern British drama (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001)
  • Ed. (with Andrew Stott), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)

  Sections in Books
  • ‘Hoarder, Collector, Media Archaeologist: Vivian Maier with Walter Benjamin’ in New Media Archaeologies, ed. Ben Roberts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2018)
  • 'The Longevity of Polaroid' in The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, ed. William A. Ewing and Barbara Hitchcock (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2017), 172-5.
  • 'Vernacular Photographic Genres After the Camera Phone' in Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting, ed. Garin Dowd and Natalia Rulyova (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 144-62.
  • ‘40,000 roses, or, the perversity of Polaroid’ in The Polaroid Years, ed. Mary-Kay Lombino (New York: Prestel, 2013), 32-53.
  • ‘Sollicitations téléphoniques: La Campagne de Martin Crimp’ in Le théâtre anglais contemporain (1985-2005), ed. Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Nicole Boireau (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007)
  • ‘Theory’ in France and America, ed. Bill Marshall (Oxford and Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005), 1126-30.
  • ‘Tel Quel’ in France and America, ed. Bill Marshall (Oxford and Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005), 1113-5.
  • ‘Carry on Welfare State: Orton, Nichols, and the Medical Profession’, in The Professions in Contemporary Drama, ed. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (Bristol: Intellect, 2003), 47-57.
  • ‘Critical Commentary’ on Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, e-book (Cultural Resources: 2002) ISBN 1-903807-09-3
  • ‘Critical Commentary’ on Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, Expedition 1: Foundation Texts from the British Heritage Database (2000) ISBN – 1-903807-02-6
  • (with Andrew Stott), ‘A Future for Haunting’ in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999), 1-20.

  Articles in Refereed Journals
  • 'The Dog and the Parakeet: Lacan among the animals', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (forthcoming 2017)
  • 'Psychoanalysis on Sunday: Lacan, Cinema, Comedy' Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 50:2 (Summer 2017), 219-38
  • 'On the diagonal: Jacques Lacan's Reading Lists' Parallax 22:4 (2016), 481-99
  • (with Daniela Caselli and Ben Ware), 'Introduction: Right in Front of our Eyes', Parallax 22: 4 (2016), 386-89
  • (with Nuria Triana-Toribio) 'Ocho apellidos vascos and the Comedy of Minor Differences' Romance Quarterly 62: 4 (2015), 229-41.
  • ‘Polaroid after digital: Technology, Cultural Form, and the social practices of snapshot photography,’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24:2 (2010): 215-230.
  • ‘The Polaroid image as photo-object,’ in Journal of Visual Culture 9:2 (2010): 1-19.
  • ‘It was better not to know,’ Radical Philosophy 163 (Sept/Oct 2010): 59-60.
  • ‘Polaroid, Aperture, and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetic divide’, History of Photography 33: 4 (2009): 357-73.
  • ‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid photography and the contradictions of cultural value’, Photographies 1:2 (2008): 221-38.
  • ‘Technical Properties’, Études britanniques contemporaines 35 (2008): 3-14.
  • ‘Photography Degree Zero: Cultural history of the Polaroid Image’, New Formations 62 (2007): 29-44.
  • ‘Tel Quel in Manhattan’, in Nottingham French Studies 44:3 (Autumn, 2005): 69-82.
  • With Nuria Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, ‘Este no es un juego, es Acción Mutante: The Provocations of Álex de la Iglesia’, Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 10: 1 (2004): 9-22.
  • With Nuria Triana Toribio and Andrew Willis, ‘A “Popular” Spanish Auteur: Alex de la Iglesia as a Polemical Tool’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2: 3 (2004): 139-48
  • ‘Arcade Magic’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (December 2001): 494-507.
  • ‘Archaeology of an Acting Style: Stanislavski, Brecht, and the Subject’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 1:2 (May 1998): 219-38.
  • ‘Stage Remains: Theatre Criticism and the Photographic Archive’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1997): 77-96.
  • ‘Sinai Snapshot: Freud, Photography, and the Future Perfect’, Textual Practice (Spring 1996): 123-44.
  • ‘Nintendo and Telos: Will You Ever Reach the End?’, Cultural Critique (Fall 1996): 163-84.
  Educational and professional qualifications

  1996 PhD , University of Wales, Cardiff
  1992 MA Critical and Cultural Theory , University of Wales, Cardiff
  1991 BA (Hons) , University of Alberta
  Professional experience (post-1990)

  2013-2016 Head of School, Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University
  2011-2013 Head of Department of English, Drama and Creative Writing, University of Salford
  2011-2013 Professor of Visual Culture, University of Salford
  2005-2011 Senior Lecturer, University of Salford
  1996-2004 Lecturer, University of Salford
  Funding

  2012 Radboud University, Nijmegen: ESPRIT network
  Result: £12, 092
  2010 Leverhulme Research fellowship: The camera does the rest
  Result: £9, 595
  2007 BA Conference Grant: Europe on Screen
  Result: £1, 315
  2007 AHRC Research Leave: Polaroid Cultures
  Result: £26, 844
  2006 BA Small grant: Polaroid Cultures
  Result: £3, 200
  2014 Santander Mobility Grant:
  Result: £750
  Professional activity

  - Reviews editor and editorial board, New Formations

  - Executive Committee, European Society for Periodical Research

  - Member, Society for the History of Technology

  - Member, Modernist Studies Association
  Research outputs

  Jump to: Article | Book | Book Section | Conference or Workshop Item
  Number of items: 12.
  Article

  Buse, Peter (2017) Psychoanalysis on Sunday : Lacan, cinema, comedy. Genre, ISSN (print) 0016-6928 (In Press)
  Buse, Peter (2017) The dog and the parakeet : Lacan among the animals. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, ISSN (print) 0969-725X (In Press)
  Buse, Peter, Caselli, Daniella and Ware, Ben (2016) Introduction : Right in front of our eyes. Parallax, 22(4), pp. 386-389. ISSN (print) 1353-4645
  Buse, Peter (2016) On the diagonal : Jacques Lacan's reading lists. Parallax, 22(4), pp. 481-499. ISSN (print) 1353-4645
  Buse, Peter and Toribio, Nuria Triana (2015) 'Ocho apellidos vascos' and the comedy of minor differences. Romance Quarterly, 62(4), pp. 229-241. ISSN (print) 0883-1157
  Buse, Peter (2010) Polaroid into digital: technology, cultural form, and the social practices of snapshot photography. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24(2), pp. 215-230. ISSN (print) 1030-4312
  Buse, Peter (2009) Polaroid, aperture and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetics divide. History of Photography, 33(4), pp. 354-369. ISSN (print) 0308-7298
  Book

  Buse, Peter (2016) The camera does the rest : how Polaroid changed photography. Chicago, U.S.A. : University of Chicago Press. 320p. ISBN 9780226176383
  Book Section

  Buse, Peter (2017) The longevity of Polaroid. In: Ewing, William A. and Hitchcock, Barbara P., (eds.) The Polaroid project : at the intersection of art and technology. London, U.K. : Thames and Hudson. pp. 172-175. ISBN 9780500544730
  Buse, Peter (2015) Vernacular photographic genres after the camera phone. In: Dowd, Garin and Rulyova, Natalia, (eds.) Genre trajectories: identifying, mapping, projecting. Basingstoke, U.K. : Palgrave. pp. 144-162. ISBN 9781137505477
  Buse, Peter (2013) 40,000 roses - or, the perversity of Polaroid. In: Lombino, Mary-Kay, (ed.) The Polaroid years. New York, U.S. : Prestel. pp. 32-53. ISBN 9783791352640
  Conference or Workshop Item

  Buse, Peter (2015) Clowning and power : Lacan, Nietzsche, Foucault. In: Rethinking democracy in literature, languages & culture; 15 - 17 May 2015, Thessaloniki, Greece. (Unpublished)
  This list was generated on Tue Jul 4 05:06:40 2017 BST.

• Nation - https://www.thenation.com/article/the-afterlife-of-polaroid/

   The Afterlife of Polaroid

  The company presents a case study in photography as a phenomenon of the instantaneous.
  By Frances RichardMAY 27, 2016
  FacebookTwitterEmailPrint

  Peter Buse, the head of the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University in London, has previously written on such non-kitschy topics as the influential poststructuralist journal Tel Quel and The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin. The Benjamin connection is especially apropos, for as Buse explains in the introduction to The Camera Does the Rest, his new study of the Polaroid camera’s influence: “Benjamin saw the key to modern culture in the detritus it left behind—objects, locations, and architectural forms that have gone out of fashion…. Only when they are decaying or at the point of vanishing, do they begin to disclose their secrets.” Like its pre-digital contemporaries “the Sony Walkman, the Kodak slide Carousel, the cassette tape,” Polaroid is a technology whose sun has set. It casts long shadows nevertheless, and in this afterglow Buse pursues two lines of inquiry, both fascinating, though they’re not always wholly integrated into a single argument.

  The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography
  By Peter Buse
  Buy this book
  Buse’s first aim is to present an episodic history of the Polaroid Corporation, with an emphasis on its self-portrayal across six decades of design and advertising strategy, an account facilitated by extensive access to the now-bankrupt firm’s archives. Similar ground was covered by Christopher Bonanos in Instant (2012), but Bonanos didn’t venture into Buse’s second area of interest: a more speculative discussion of Polaroids compared with other types of photographs generated through other processes, from daguerreotypes to Instagram. Thinking with Buse about Polaroid as a company, we scan the landscape of 20th-century technical and commercial innovation, populated by figures like founder Edwin Land—“often held up as the last of the American inventor-heroes,” a link between Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs—as well as longtime company consultant Ansel Adams, who fought against the tendency, in-house and in consumers’ minds, to treat the instant image as an idiot-proof fad.

  Thinking about Polaroid as a specific kind of photograph, meanwhile, we seek in Benjaminian fashion to understand what the stiff, white-bordered, black-backed picture ejected from a big, square, whirring camera can disclose about photography in general. Should we understand a photographic document as being first and foremost an artifact of memory, a light-written ghost? Or is it more important to stress its status as a material thing created from pigment, silver, emulsion, paper, plastic, glass, silicon sensors, pulses of electricity? Or is the photograph primarily an opportunity to take or make, an arena for a special type of action? The Camera Does the Rest, with its focus on doing, argues for the latter. This is not entirely convincing by the end; for as Buse himself shows, to watch the Polaroid “as it magically fade[d] up from a gray green murk” was already to watch the moment becoming history.

  “Who, of a certain age, cannot recognize a Polaroid?” Buse asks, adding that the name has come to signify in a way that other brand names do not; one would not speak of “a shoebox full of Kodaks, a compromising Fuji, a cherished Ilford.” In fact, there never was just one Polaroid. The company was founded in 1937 to produce polarizing filters for military goggles and other visual-assistance hardware. A few years later, according to company lore, Land’s little daughter asked why she had to wait to see the photos her father snapped. Land took up the quest for undelayed photographic gratification, and—establishing a pattern that would govern Polaroid’s fortunes for good and ill until it filed for Chapter 11 in 2001—the firm invested years of research before launching the first instant camera in 1947. A decade later, camera and film sales accounted for 97 percent of its revenues, a dominance that lasted until the mid-1990s, when digital imaging came to the fore and the exhaustive research and development that had sustained Polaroid as nonpareil began instead to hamper its adaptability.

  In the interim, the company produced cameras for customers across a wide range of economic classes and specialist knowledge, from budget-conscious amateurs to luxury-seeking dilettantes and exacting cognoscenti. This uneasy positioning between cheap-and-easy and cutting-edge could take on a gendered cast as well as a class-conscious one; Land reminded his designers in the 1950s that their product “must be kept simple, mother-proof,” and in 1965 the Swinger model was pitched to teenagers by a bikini-clad Ali McGraw, who spent more time in TV ads twirling the jaunty plastic box by its wrist strap than she did pressing its shutter. Type 55 film, conversely, was developed in 1958 for (presumptively male) professional photographers like Adams, who insisted on having a viable negative; the classic Polaroid print, with its integral negative and rip-off sheath, was positive-only, one-of-a-kind. The Captiva, Polaroid’s final design innovation, debuted in 1992: It incorporated a transparent reservoir into which new prints ejected, in part to protect them while the operator worked, but also to serve as a perversely after-the-fact analog variant of the preview screen already standard in digital cameras.

  * * *

  The most famous Polaroid camera was the SX-70, announced in 1972 via a promotional film commissioned from Charles and Ray Eames, and advertised on television by Sir Laurence Olivier. (He stipulated that the spots air only in the United States.) Land envisioned a high-end clientele, and the collapsible camera’s exterior panels were surfaced in cowhide. The SX-70 was a status symbol, but it was also a truly ingenious apparatus for color photography, which in the early 1970s was not yet widely accepted as an aesthetic pursuit. This ultimate point-and-shoot thus solicited unorthodox exploration. Buse notes that “Curious SX-70 users popped them in toasters or freezers to see how they would respond. They scratched the image while it was still developing, added thumb-prints and painted on it,” or squeezed its molten dyes into abstractions. Andy Warhol shot with an SX-70, as did David Hockney, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras, and—more surprisingly—Walker Evans and Minor White. Polaroid embraced its role as patron and, spurred on by Adams, developed a generous Artist Support Program, distributing free film and equipment, as well as invitations to experiment with a massive 20-by-24-inch camera in a dedicated studio near the company’s corporate headquarters in Cambridge, down the street from MIT. Adjacent was a gallery for display of the Polaroid Collections, including photographs by Chuck Close, Mary Ellen Mark, John Waters, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Wegman. In the 1980s, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the company deployed a gargantuan 40-by-80-inch camera to print facsimiles of paintings, and Polaroid remained a sustaining advertiser for the fine-art photography magazine Aperture (which was edited by White) for 40 years.

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  All the while, of course, friends were laughing over instant snapshots passed around at parties, and shutterbugs whose tastes would have shocked the drugstore photo-finisher were shooting and sharing explicit pictures in bedrooms. Polaroid systems manufactured ID cards, documented crime scenes, assisted real-estate agents and insurance adjustors, monitored film-set continuity, and expanded the reaches of micrography. How, then, did the business go so wrong?

  Polaroid, explains Buse, did not “sleepwalk into the digital era”; it saw what was coming and, “as early as 1980, when the OneStep was the world’s best-selling camera, and Polaroid was reaping the benefits of simplified SX-70 technology, the company applied for patents for an electronic camera.” Yet its perfectionistic research culture slowed production, and while the firm was “accustomed to holding a monopoly over instant photography, protected by a wall of patents, [it] held no such advantage in digital imaging.” When the digital PDC-2000 finally launched in 1996, more than 40 competitors had already entered the market. Worse, Polaroid had doubled down on a “doomed hard-copy wager”: Convinced that users of all stripes would always desire a physical print to hold, the company concentrated on developing scanners and other peripherals to relay the image from virtual to tangible to replicable—precisely the intermediate steps that networked data had rendered obsolete.

  Polaroid declared bankruptcy on October 12, 2001. Its name was licensed to other firms, including Fuji, whose Instax camera and film were rebranded as Polaroid 300 for sales in the United States. The Polaroid Collection was auctioned at Sotheby’s, and the corporate archives donated to Harvard Business School. (With devastating precision, Buse observes that the short-term CEO and chairman who presided over this dismantling received “one-off payments of $8.5 million and $12.8 million, respectively,” while “approximately 6,000 retirees who had lost benefits” got checks for $47 each.) Then, in 2008, a Dutch-Austrian enterprise dubbed the Impossible Project bought up as much of the remaining film stock as it could get its hands on, along with the last functioning film-production facility, in the Netherlands. While serving as a distribution hub for refurbished cameras and leftover packs of original film, the start-up began to rebuild Polaroid’s supply chain and reinvent its film under its own name. Proclaiming an intention “to re-design analog photography for a digital generation,” the Impossible Project has taken as its motto Land’s dictum: “Don’t undertake a project unless it’s manifestly important and nearly impossible.” One can now download an app from the Impossible Project’s website and use it to crop and edit a smartphone image, print that image on Impossible instant film, pass it back through the app’s scanner, and retransfer it to a digital device to be shared (again) online.

  * * *

  Why would anyone do this? Aside from the nostalgic, kitschy pleasure of entertaining the hard-copy wager when more efficient options are ubiquitous, Polaroid in its afterlife presents a case study in photography as a phenomenon of the instantaneous. Photochemically or photoelectrically, by tintype or iPhone, fixing a split second of living presence into a likeness that can be filed away or passed from hand to hand is to enter a sphere in which ephemeral experience, stilled object, and persistent memory—the phases or aspects of photography that Buse differentiates—blur back into one another. A Polaroid, Buse argues, “like any photographic image, has a complex and vexed relation to memory and the past; but its memorializing capacities are arguably not its main attraction three minutes after it has been made.” Returning to the point, he proposes that “the act of photographing is just as important as, if not more important than, the resulting photograph…. in the process of its making there is an element of duration, a live moment.”

  This last statement is undeniable, as far as it goes. But a “live moment” underpins other photographic acts too, and the demand to access the image instantly, shared by Land’s daughter and any Instagrammer, suggests not a lack of interest in freezing and re-encountering a blip of lost time, but rather an obsession with doing so. Polaroids shortened the distance between choosing a moment to frame and the alienating, beguiling opportunity of seeing that moment’s effigy flattened and miniaturized into a thing that could be stockpiled. And the shortened waiting period, in turn, catalyzed certain picture genres: the party Polaroid, the pornographic Polaroid, the Polaroid as icebreaker with standoffish kids, celebrities, or strangers. But being instantaneous, it turns out, is malleable, scalable. Polaroids intensified the sense of photographs as verbs, not nouns, but they didn’t create it.

  In a similar vein, the digital afterlife of what Buse calls “Polaroid values” suggests that objects are sometimes more protean than his book allows. Buse tells a great story about the corporation’s 1972 report to its shareholders. Each copy of the prospectus—40,000 in all—came adorned with its own photograph of the same red rose:

  The rose was ostensibly chosen to show off the film’s handling of tricky reds and delicate detail, as well as the close-focusing capacities of the SX-70 camera. Forty years on, it is not these features of the rose print that give us pause. It is instead the thought that every single one of these 40,000 prints had to be individually produced….

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  A kind of madness, then, but also a perfect lesson in what an extraordinary device Polaroid had invented: a machine for making unique photo-objects….

  In vividly emphasizing this extravagant investment in nonvirtual materiality, Buse in effect clouds his thesis about photography as an act. For here the action and its traces fuse—each one an individual act, performed 40,000 times.

  The result, to return to Walter Benjamin’s territory, is a recalibration of that subtle and potent energy called aura. For the modernist melancholic, writing in 1935, aura is constituted by a singular entity’s irreducible “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” This would seem very simple: Either the painting, building, or manuscript—or the positive-only Polaroid with its gelatinous, saturated depths—is right here, now, or it isn’t. It can’t be copied—or perhaps it can, but the copy isn’t it: The copy has no aura, because the live increment of human effort expended in making the auratic original cannot be replicated. A rose is a rose is a rose, but only if photographed one at a time.

  This, however, is where the materiality of photographs—even the regular kind, with negatives, or the digital kind, proffered to the eye through a glass screen framed in plastic and backed by silicon photoreceptors—reasserts itself. Buse discusses “a growing group of ‘photo-materialists,’ who study what they call photo-objects.” The analyses of such critics, among them Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (whom Buse quotes), reinvest “photographs of all sorts with their own ‘aura’ of thingness.” “It is not by chance,” he adds, “that this critical turn coincided with the rise of digital photography.” Coded simulacra induce a longing for the sensually palpable; at the same time, daily lives populated by computerized cameras, phones, tablets, cars, coffeemakers, and nuclear reactors remind us that computers and their outputs are things too. Just as the action of taking a photo and the trace—say, a rose—that a photo preserves are hard to keep neatly separate, the distinction between the photo as a singular physical object and a duplicable unit of information threatens to erode. Indeed, even the one-of-a-kind Polaroid flirted with replication: Customers could send their prints to a copy service at Cambridge HQ, and well before the Captiva’s plastic print holder mimicked the digital preview screen, experts like White and Adams touted the instant print’s feedback capacities. “With digital photography,” as Buse puts it, “the photographer does not have to wait to complete a whole roll of film before he or she discovers a mistake or an interesting effect, but this potential for shooting, seeing, and shooting again was already present in Polaroid image-making.”

  The photo-materialist impulse, in any case, isn’t exclusive to media scholars. When I discuss the aura with undergraduates, they grasp the exclusively-here-exclusively-now absolutism of Benjamin’s premise. But they usually want to talk instead about what might be termed Aura 2.0: They want to explore the ways in which the coded, authorless, mass-circulation image can reacquire individuality and locatedness like a patina, becoming not just any copy but this copy, uniquely stained and creased or file-corrupted, or simply irreplaceably familiar, idiosyncratically one’s own. If Polaroid taught the photographing public to understand the one-off, auratic image as being, paradoxically, produced by a machine, then the digital image teaches the same lesson from the opposite direction. The infinitely duplicable photo can still assert its elegiac specificity, its material connections to life lived in time and space.

  We have, then, a sense that distinctions are weakening between singular and plural, between that which is sui generis in an actual, verifiable way, and that which is marked as personal only through proximity and habit. Is this just another way of discussing the photograph or the camera as fetishized commodities? The Swinger jingle, selling the promise that the instant image could hang out with you, respond to you, implied yes: “It’s more than a camera / It’s almost alive / It’s only 19 dollars and 95.” The Camera Does the Rest meditates further on this will to invest the photograph with a lifelike, embodied volatility when it addresses the persistent myth—demonstrably untrue—that Polaroids are particularly apt to fade:

  Whether or not Polaroid snapshots actually fade is almost beside the point: their meaning in culture is as that which fades, and a collective hallucination of their fading follows on from this…. Polaroid images, generated quickly and consumed on-the-spot, have been judged against the principle that living fast means dying young.

  One may debate the relative powers of the photograph when treated as a memento, or as a tangible object, or as a social act—and the history of the company reads like a précis of popular image technology in the 20th century. But, as Buse demonstrates, in being so different from so many other kinds of photographs, the Polaroid helps to reveal what photography has been, and what it does.

Instant Photos
Library Journal. 141.8 (May 1, 2016): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Full Text:
Buse, Peter. The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Univ. of Chicago. May 2016. 336p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780226176383. $30; ebk. ISBN 9780226312163. PHOTOG

For some, Polaroid is a nostalgia-tinged household word. For others, the once famous name--synonymous with the instant print photographic process--will be thoroughly unfamiliar, evincing the dramatic rise and eclipse of analog photography with the triumph of digital imaging. Mining the Polaroid archives in the Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Buse (The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia) researches how Polaroid cameras were marketed, the aesthetics of the Polaroid print, and the social rituals associated with owning and taking instant images. Other books detail the life of Polaroid's founder Edwin H. Land and examine the company's distinctive milieu; this scholarly cultural history is distinguished by Buse's background in performance studies. The author is less interested in studying pictures than he is in thinking about the performative moment of taking and sharing instant photos, an aspect unique to Polaroid--until digital photography came into existence--an innovation that led to Polaroid's demise but was also facilitated by instant film. VERDICT For readers interested in photography history, the cultural history of technology, innovation, and business history.--Michael Dashkin, New York

Before the selfie stick
Dianne Timblin
American Scientist. 104.5 (September-October 2016): p315.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
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THE CAMERA DOES THE REST: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Peter Buse. ix + 308. University of Chicago Press, 2016. $30.00.

Point, click. The gesture is now so familiar that its onetime novelty seems distant and improbable, even though--when I nudge myself from the dreamlike state of digital ubiquity--I well remember photography as a significantly more complex process. In many ways Polaroid paved the way for this state of photographic affairs, even as it has been largely sidelined, after two bankrupcies in the first decade of this century, from what might have been a victory lap.

Critic and theorist Peter Buse's fine examination of the cultural history of Polaroid technology, The Camera Does the Rest, considers the societal forces at work as the company succeeded and failed, from the launch of its first camera in 1948 to its existence today. Buse considers the cultural forces Polaroid was responding to as well as those it helped shape as a highly influential global brand. It built its reputation on technological innovation cultivated within a "model of perfectionistic deep research" that was, Buse explains, "central to Polaroid's ethos." To call Polaroid the Apple of its day would be reductive: Steve Jobs patterned himself after company founder Edwin Land, openly citing him as a role model. (For more on this topic and on Land himself, Christopher Bonanos's book Instant: The Story of Polaroid is well worth a look.) Perhaps it's more accurate to say that Apple is the Polaroid of our moment.

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Land, who left his chemistry studies at Harvard to devote himself to inventing an inexpensive polarizing filter, originated the field of instant photography--that is, photography that features in-camera development to produce a print immediately--with the release of Polaroid's first camera in 1948. He and a team of scientists, engineers, and designers continually refined the company's cameras, regularly producing breakthrough innovations, such as a sonar-based autofocus system; a 20x24 large-format camera, which became a darling of photographers; and the first truly one-step instant camera, the SX-70, which developed in daylight, without any intervention by the photographer (for example, pulling the print from the camera or removing a backing from the print).

Land's sense of showmanship helped cement Polaroid's reputation for innovation. Buse notes that he was often depicted in the media as "some sort of scientist-hermit," despite a lack of evidence, possibly because "commentators ... automatically read Land in terms of the popular image of the scientist as lab-bound, socially awkward, and preoccupied with his experiments to the exclusion of all else." In truth, his demonstrations of Polaroid's latest innovations, especially those presented during highly anticipated, carefully staged annual meetings, were part of a tradition harking back to earlier figures, such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. To apply the shy scientist stereotype to Land, Buse says, is "to obscure the ways in which he was really a throwback to a previous model of the scientist-inventor as public figure." Land understood how crucial demonstrations were for his company's defining product. Instant photography is very much about the social moment: sharing the instant when an image is captured and the developing time as it comes into view. Often, too, it is about sharing the physical image, as Polaroid users often gave away photos spontaneously. Polaroid extended its emphasis on demonstration into the sales field, where its representatives would photograph shoppers and offer them the images to keep. In 1960 alone, Polaroid sales staff gave away 1.5 million snapshots.

The Camera Does the Rest is foremost a social analysis of a technology, or as Buse puts it, examining "a technology in culture." Although he includes mechanical and scientific details along the way, Buse's real aim is to consider the broader context in which instant photography was presented and received, how people used the devices, what they thought about it, and what they continue to believe about the medium. Scholarly and philosophical, the book is an intriguing read, although not a casual one.

Today Polaroid endures as a revenant of its former self, its research and development functions having shut down a decade ago. Digital photography is widely considered the culprit, and it was instrumental in Polaroid's decline, which Buse narrates enlighteningly. Yet he also wisely reframes the discussion. "It is not a question of when digital did in Polaroid," he explains, "but what remains in digital of Polaroid." Buse's answers offer insights into our interactions with technologies over time, as well as new ways of understanding the evolution of contemporary shutterbugs.

Dianne Timblin is the book review editor for American Scientist. Find her on Twitter: @diannetimblin.

Caption: Early Polaroid instructional leaflets, such as the one shown above, which was distributed around 1949, depicted the original, multistep instant photographic process in detail. At right, promotional images for the Polaroid Captiva from 1992 feature a camera that's an "uncanny double of cameras to come," notes Peter Buse. The camera's display window holds a cached physical print, the design anticipating digital cameras' preview screens, which date from 1995, three years after the Captiva was introduced. From The Camera Does the Rest.

Caption: Polaroid's color prints have sustained a contradictory reputation: Some believe the images are more saturated than competitors' prints, whereas others find them more faded. Buse offers for examination two prints from the 1960s: a Kodacolor snapshot (left) and a Polacolor snap (right). From The Camera Does the Rest.

The Polaroid years: instant photography and experimentation
C. Chiarenza
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.3 (Nov. 2013): p448.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
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The Polaroid years: instant photography and experimentation. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center/DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2013. 224p ISBN 3791352644, $49.95, ISBN 9783791352640, $49.95

This curious exhibition catalogue is interesting, but does not reflect what the title suggests might be a volume encompassing the whole of artists' experimental work using the amazing range of Polaroid materials. Instead, the texts by curator Mary-Kay Lombino (Vassar) and literature/ culture/modernity lecturer Peter Buse (Univ. of So/ford, UK) focus almost entirely on the SX-70 camera and film. Even more curious, most of the reproductions (images in the exhibition) are not SX-70s. Nor are they the primary subject of the accompanying Polaroid time line. Most of the artists' statements focus on other Polaroid products. Important artists are included, but few are from the vast group of artist users of Polaroid's black-and-white materials. Finally, none of the texts (much of Buse's being repetitious of well-known facts) expand readers' knowledge of, or answer questions about, Polaroid artists. Major black-and-white artists (Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and Andre Kertesz) are represented by SX-70 images! Even though other books tell readers more about artists who used Polaroid technology, no bibliography is included. Makers of snapshots (amateurs) were the largest group of users of SX-70. Summing Up: Optional. * Lower-level undergraduates and general readers.--C. Chiarenza, emeritus, University of Rochester

Chiarenza, C.

"Instant Photos." Library Journal, 1 May 2016, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450998908&it=r&asid=159b2531e5bcac6be6cd063dfb24447c. Accessed 4 July 2017. Timblin, Dianne. "Before the selfie stick." American Scientist, vol. 104, no. 5, 2016, p. 315+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462685368&it=r&asid=b7e129ab956bd009451f142d4599773c. Accessed 4 July 2017. Chiarenza, C. "The Polaroid years: instant photography and experimentation." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2013, p. 448. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA350164622&it=r&asid=dbf473fbf690f30aad3edc7045fbc90b. Accessed 4 July 2017.

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  Review of The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography

  The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography
  by Peter Buse
  University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2016
  320 pp. Trade, $30
  ISBN: 978-0226176383
  Reviewed by
  Ana Peraica
  February 2017
  The Camera does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography by Peter Buse, provides a missing historical closure on an aesthetic, technical, but also social phenomena of unfortunate Polaroid technology.

  Namely, despite having its own separate market niche of Polaroid lovers, after researching possible developments of digital imaging, the company has ceased the production of film, back in 2008, filing bankruptcy. Many photographers were attached to the visual layout of Polaroid (some arguments have also been laid in a Grant Hamilton's movie Time Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid from 2012). Imputed by nostalgia on the missing technology, there is a revival of Polaroid film in the Impossible project, accompanied with revival of style of its technology in digital surrounding, as for example, colour field narrowing or vanishing effects.

  The original Polaroid film was released in 1947 by the innovator Erwin Land (1949–66 Visiting Professor at Harvard and Professor at MIT since 1956), who has also constructed the Land camera, released in 1948. Land's interest in both science and art pushed him to choose among his technical collaborators famous photographer and moreover—laboratory worker, Anselm Adams as well. In succeeding years, different models of Polaroid were developed, the most famous being: Pathfinder in '52, Swinger in '65, SX-70 in '72, Onestep in '77, Spectra in '86, Captiva in '93, I-Zone in '99, etc., as well as films ranging from high fidelity black and white, sepia, Panchromatic, Polacolor, Time-Zero, Spectra HD.

  The model reaching the largest popularity among all Polaroid products was surely the SX-70, after which Polaroid become recognizable for its technical and visual appearance. Memorialized through the SX-70 camera, Polaroid is also recognizable for its appearance: a specific square format, placed on a rectangular white sheet in a Golden Rule. Furthermore it is known for its specific saturation glows. But it is most famous for always being singular, irreproducible, and necessarily photo-technique, characteristic for its speed, lacking the delaying darkroom process (though precisely its chemical process, on which also Ansel Adams worked, were the most complicated).

  The uniqueness of a Polaroid has made it the most private and intimate among other photographic techniques, but also the most social and participative party camera ever constructed. Its range of implementation was diverse, as Buse shows, from proving "thought photography," or recording the non-continuous reality, to being an entry-ticket to exclusive parties. And precisely for the possibility of being a really private technology, still simultaneously leaving a document-trace, Polaroid was, both in reality and movies, a centre of many conspiracy plots in the twentieth century. Throughout the book readers learn details of the specific Polaroid models but also scandals connected to quick Polaroid shots (the most known surely the one with Duchess of Argyll's image with "headless man"), or the place of technology as a central part of a movie plot, commonly being a blackmail, in films among others: The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Smile (1975), Infinite Jest (1995), et al.

  Providing numerous facts and stories, in a journalistic style, this book seems to be a perfect gift to all photography lovers who demand excellent academic research; its style is light and approachable and its thesis, well-argued, providing more than substantial information on this charming photo technique (with more than 40 pages of notes posited on the back and even 20 pages of bibliography).

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  Instant Photography Before the Digital Era
  BY SARAH BOSLAUGH
  14 June 2016
  THE POLAROID CAMERAS BROUGHT INSTANT GRATIFICATION TO PHOTOGRAPHY LONG BEFORE THE DIGITAL ERA.
  cover art
  THE CAMERA DOES THE REST: HOW POLAROID CHANGED PHOTOGRAPHY
  PETER BUSE
  (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS)

  AMAZON
  UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
  AMAZON
  ITUNES
  In the era when mobile phones come equipped with built-in cameras, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t that long ago that for most people taking photographs meant shooting with a film camera and then shipping the film to a lab for processing and printing. Film was a huge improvement in terms of convenience and cost over earlier processes—the first surviving photograph, dating from 1836 or 1847, was captured on a metal plate coated with bitumen, and glass plates were commonly used into the 20th century—but photographic film requires processing and printing before you can see the pictures.

  The most obvious disadvantage of this process is the delay between taking the photos and being able to see them, because you can’t know on the spot if the images you recorded are any good. You also can’t share the pictures immediately, so there’s no sending the kids home from a birthday party with a photo of themselves as a keepsake, or taking a picture of yourself with a celebrity and then having him or her autograph the resulting picture on the spot.

  Photographic processing and printing is also expensive, and bulk processing labs typically print everything on a roll, so you end up paying for prints that are over- or under-exposed or make a tree appear to be growing out of someone’s head as well and the good shots you actually want to keep. Finally, the quality of the prints is partially dependent on the technical abilities of some anonymous technician, and the lab may refuse to print your photos at all if, say, your taste runs toward the pornographic.

  The genius of the Polaroid camera, developed by Edwin Land and introduced to the market in 1948, is that they use film that develops itself on the spot, providing the closest thing to “instant photography” available before the introduction of the digital camera. While the term “Polaroid” may be most strongly associated with amateurs taking snapshots at family or social events, Polaroid photography has been used for professional purposes as well, in fields as diverse as fashion, insurance, real estate, law enforcement, medicine, and dentistry. Some visual artists have also worked with Polaroid cameras, and they played a key role in the plots of several movies, including The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Memento (2000).

  Peter Buse’s The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography is a well-researched and thorough history of Polaroid photography, covering both the technical aspects of the cameras and their film, and the influence of this technology on society. It’s generously illustrated but is by no means a coffee-table book. Instead, it’s a serious history and analysis of the Polaroid phenomenon, and each illustration is included to make some point. While not every reader may be interested in all aspects of this story, from the “Eureka moment” that sparked the discovery of Polaroid technology (Land’s three-year-old daughter wanted to see some vacation photos immediately) to the financial troubles which led to the company declaring bankruptcy in 2001, it’s so well written that you may find some fascination even in topics that would not normally interest you.

  The Polaroid may be seen as a further development of a trend begun by the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera around 1900: Both were technical innovations that made photography more popular by making it possible for people without specialized knowledge or skills to take acceptable photographs. Granted, the Brownie had many technical limitations, but it was cheap and sturdy and easy to use, and some great photographers like Vivian Maier got their start with a Brownie or an equivalent camera. Shooting with a Brownie could not have been simpler, and once the film was shot, the user shipped the entire camera back to Kodak, where technicians removed the roll of film, developed and printed the photographs, and loaded another roll of film before shipping the camera back to its owner. The Polaroid took the simplification of the photographic process one step further through the use of film that developed itself on the spot, so the pictures were ready to be seen within a minute or so of being taken.

  Like the Brownie, consumer Polaroid models were limited in their technical capabilities, but that was exactly what many people wanted. Take the Swinger, introduced in 1965, whose very name suggests youth and fun and being “with it” in the era of Swinging London. It used a plastic lens within a lightweight plastic body and was perhaps half a step up from a simple a box camera like the Brownie, but consumers didn’t care—they just wanted to have fun taking pictures, and the Swinger helped them to do that. The Swinger quickly became the best-selling Polaroid model and helped raise the company’s share of the American camera market share from 11 percent in 1964 to about one third by 1966. Also typical of consumer Polaroid cameras, the Swinger automated decisions that a higher-end camera would require the user to make; for instance, thanks to a semiautomatic exposure system that would cause the word “Yes” to appear in the viewfinder when the exposure was correct.

  The introduction of digital cameras brought an end to the Polaroid era, and Polaroid cameras have joined vinyl records in the category of obsolete but cool technology. For instance, you can now buy apps that allow you to take a digital picture with your phone that has some of the iconic qualities of a Polaroid, right down to the wide white bottom border and distinctive frame size. The popularity of the resulting “fauxlaroids” just goes to show that some things old really are new again.

  THE CAMERA DOES THE REST: HOW POLAROID CHANGED PHOTOGRAPHY
  Rating: 7/10

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