According to this article, the Polaroid company is going to stop making film for its instant cameras. (It doesn't say it in the piece but it's kind of assumed you know they stopped making the cameras a year or two ago.)
This is sad but inevitable. It's also stunning in a way because I can remember when the Polaroid Land camera was one of the great success stories in the history of American industry. My Uncle Aaron used to brag that he'd had the foresight to buy Polaroid stock when it was a dollar a share. Okay, so he didn't tell people that he'd only bought around twenty shares and that he'd sold them when the price of the stock doubled. The point was that "I bought Polaroid stock when it first came on the market" was a tremendous boast.
I still have Uncle Aaron's old 1950-something Polaroid camera here somewhere. It used a kind of film which only came in black-and-white (and involved the application of a messy fixative) which they stopped making in the mid-seventies or thereabouts. Somewhere here, I also have one of their most popular late models, the SX-70, which I haven't used in at least ten years. That's a photo of an SX-70 (not mine) above.
It came in handy here and there, occasionally even for taking pictures of women with their clothes on. I was surprised to learn it could do that. What's more, it could take photos of raccoons in my backyard and also of the car that ran into the front of my house one night. It came in very handy until I got my first digital camera. The advantage of the digital is not just that it gives a clearer picture which you can easily e-mail to someone. There's that but with the digital, it doesn't cost a buck and a half every time you press the shutter.
I'm not sure where my SX-70 is but when I find it, I'm not tossing it out, even if I can't buy film for it. It's a piece of history so I think I'll put it in the closet right next to my Betamax, my Laserdisc Player, my Wordstar manuals, my 8mm projector, my reel-to-reel tape recorder, my Playboy Club card and my first agent. None of them are good for much of anything anymore, either.