Sixty years after the sale of the first Polaroid instant camera – the iconic camera that captured the imagination of a market by producing finished prints in under a minute – the Polaroid Corporation announced that later this year it will cease making instant film products.  It’s the end of era, but one that most of us probably thought ended years ago.

Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke once famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  While the Polaroid camera may seem hopelessly old-fashioned today, there was a time when it did indeed seem like magic.

I was reminded of this on a trip last August to Ipuli, a rural village in central Tanzania.  Ipuli is the definition of remote: it’s 15-hour car ride from Dar es Salaam; set in the hills of the central Rift Valley it has no electricity, running water or cars.  I was in Ipuli as part of a Pop!Tech team to document a health-center project and our four-person crew came equipped with the latest hi-tech gear: video cameras, sound booms, high-end digital cameras. 

What garnered the most attention though, was my boxy little Polaroid.  Everywhere I went people followed me, eager to have their picture taken. But they were uninterested in my fancy, expensive Cannon; what they wanted was a picture from what they called the “magic camera.” With it I was able to instantly hand out prints to people, many of  whom lacking household accoutrements like mirrors, had never seen themselves before.

After the first day I was almost out of instant film. I tried to explain to the disappointed villagers the vast superiority of my digital camera: with it, I could take hundreds of pictures, not dozens!  And I could print them out, as many as I liked! And then I could post them on Flickr, and geo-tag them and…. well, you can guess how that conversation ended.  At that point my translator gave me an exasperated look and simply shook his head.

My digital camera was the epitome of high tech sophisticaton, but my Polaroid was magic - it captured a moment, and then created another, more potent one: when someone looked at the white-framed piece of film and saw their face for the very first time.  All without USB cables, electrical plugs, printers or computers.   Magic.

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