But imitation alone wasn’t enough. Nuances mattered. Or something else was bubbling under the surface — unspoken, unadmitted, but piling up.
By accident or calculation, Impossible struck a nerve. Something shameful, perhaps. Something improper to voice. But something desperate to break out.

Impossible were busy reviving Polaroid film, which hadn’t survived the digital revolution, releasing their first experimental batch back in 2010 — the very same year Instagram appeared. Two worlds, yet strangely aligned if you look closer.

The app’s very name — “Instagram,” basically “image of the instant” — was a wink at instant photography (complete with the camera silhouette icon, rainbow stripe tucked in the corner). Square frames with captions underneath: homage, plain and simple. Retro-washed filters. And its explosive popularity screamed that people were sick of “quality photography” — they wanted something else.
Defects and flaws were no longer guilty pleasures of forum-dwellers; Instagram filters were mainstreaming the aesthetic.

Impossible’s first films had to be reinvented from scratch (the original Polaroid formula was long gone) — reverse-engineering, blind experiments, chaos. The lousy quality was supposed to be tolerated as “temporary,” or reframed as a “feature, not a bug.” The emulsion was literally alive. Experiments rolled on, the lineup expanded. A niche audience embraced it: lomographers, lo-fi fanatics, tinkerers, lovers of grain and expired stock.

And here’s the thing: for some, choosing a filter may be an agony.
But don’t you dare call that creativity.
Lomographers — they’re the glorious madmen, consciously pushing their gear and materials to the edge, heretical souls defying dogma.
Instagram users — a bunch of chubby malingerers, simulating life itself.

Polaroid, though, in photography?

A category of its own. Always was.

Unpredictable, elusive, fading, mutating into ugliness.

One single photograph.

Barely scannable, impossible to reproduce — the plastic glare mocks the hardware.

A strange half-brother to daguerreotypes and tintypes. A crooked little bridge back into the 19th century.

And yet: making that one great Polaroid shot, catching that instant, is brutally hard. Hardware flaws plus a laughably narrow exposure latitude — blink, and you’ve lost it.

Bought yourself a big cheap 600-series plastic brick? Congratulations — you haven’t bought a camera, you’ve signed up for a lifetime film subscription. A timeshare you’ll never escape.

Failed photos will stay in memory, with that sting of disappointment you can’t quite express. Like dropping a coin in a slot machine — and nothing. Just a fading scrap of plastic: something-has-been. No matter what — as details blur and outlines fade, the tiny scrap assures us: that-has-been, oh yes.

Polaroid was doomed. And let’s stop pretending: Polaroids are crap.

Impossible Lab became an impossible idea: an endless controlled experiment. Not photography, but reproduction — forgery, a cheat against the medium itself. Shameful and subterranean, like teenage complexes: the spoiled digital user’s urge to smash the stubborn material and bend the process to their will.

Like inventing a time machine, going back thirty years, beating up your bullies, and then kissing the girl you were obsessed with (better yet, several of them). Rewind, repeat, until it works.

The Instant Lab should never have existed — the idea itself corroded the medium and the practice.

Impossible must have suspected this, and left a loophole: the device could be dismantled and used as a camera back. Finally, the missing tool. The results were impressive.

And what came after? The team bought the Polaroid brand itself, at first under the suffix “Originals.” The deal price was never disclosed, but surely far higher than the old 2008 bargain for the factory. But what are walls and machines compared to a brand legend you can milk forever?

The “new” Polaroid rolled out cameras — stylish, hip, youth-bait. Still useless for thoughtful work. Why bother, when you can sit on every chair generously laid out by pop culture? Shoutout to the collabs with MoMA, Lego, Thrasher!

Instant Lab support? Dropped. Instead they flog the Polaroid Lab — another printer, this time sealed tight, no way to hack it into something real.

Impossible Project were dreamers, doubters, probing the edge of the possible.

Today’s Polaroid? Office clerks and accountants, clipping coupons off nostalgia and vintage chic, while slowly suffocating the medium they inherited.


Polaroid. Originals? Impossible!