Sinbad Says 'Cheese!'

Besides its legendary technological prowess, Polaroid Corporation has consistently demonstrated an uncanny knack for capitalising on the issues that make photographers uneasy. The original Polaroid process cut down on processing time from days to minutes, but it also gave snapshot photographers the ability to produce finished pictures (especially erotica) free from the prying eyes of Kodak's notorious photolab censors. The SX-70 of the early 70s cut development time down to a matter of seconds, but more importantly, the new process ended the waste of the original 'pull and tear' process - a real problem for consumers newly aware of the horrors of industrial pollution.

This spring, Polaroid is introducing its newest technological marvel, 'The Talking Camera'. Using a computer chip to record messages that can be played back before exposure, the talking Polaroid may not be a technological miracle, but it does address the recurrent photographic issue of the 90s: fear of photography. From the media backlash following the broadcast of distressed bystanders at the Challenger disaster, to celebrity/paparazzi punch-ups, it's been the school of hard knocks for Americans and the politics of the image. The whole country seems to have had enough of being represented in photographs that serve little more than the bottom line of media conglomerates, whether TV stations or art museums.

Because most people have no way of coming into contact with the media powers that be, they've taken to playing out their representational politics on a grassroots level. That means dealing with photographers in a much more active way, forcing photographs to be more participatory. People want to know why a photographer wants to make a picture and what he or she is going to do with it. Whose story is the picture going to tell and whose viewpoint is it going to support? At one time it was possible to believe that the increased visual representation provided by photography (not just the rich could have their portrait made) would insure a greater cultural enfranchisement, a greater representational presence for all classes of people, a way for the other stories of Western society to be told. This notion has given way to a suspicion, fostered by art photographers in particular, that the photograph is a means by which a photographer communicates what he or she thinks of the world, regardless of the photograph's subject. The result is the current impasse. Photographers who have been force-fed the idea that their viewpoint is the most important element of the photograph find themselves across the camera from a populace that feels totally excluded from a medium which uses their lives as raw material. Having conveniently quashed what has been apparent from the first photographs - that the subject is co-author of every image and should be recognised as a participating member of every photographic engagement - the 150 year-old regime of photographic authorship is now facing a popular rebellion. The represented have had enough.

This crisis in photographic representation can be seen as a sign of a crisis in larger representational systems, in this case American-style representative democracy. From the revolt against incumbent Democratic congresspeople and senators to the popular call for term limits, Americans are turning on their elected representatives in record numbers. Suddenly the idea that one person can represent the needs of others has become problematic. More and more, Americans are barraging their congressional representatives with phone calls, faxes, email messages, and letters. Time magazine recently devoted an entire issue to the notion that this barrage was a danger to representative democracy, that senators and congressmen have become little more than pawns of polls and the Internet. But the real problem isn't some distant hyper-democratic revolution, it's the widely held feeling that congressional representatives don't truly represent anyone but themselves, large corporate interests, and their communally held purses. Like photographers, political representatives have crossed a line - the represented no longer see themselves as a part of the process of representation.

While the Talking Camera is a far cry from a cure for the crisis facing representative democracy, the people at Polaroid are aware of the problem, and, in their own technological way, are trying to resolve it. Polaroid's TV advertising campaign, based around crossover comedian Sinbad, is explicit: the Talking Camera is a sneaky but fun way to embrace subjects who don't want their pictures taken - in Polaroid's words 'to share' in the making of a photograph. Each TV commercial is a short scenario of an ideal photographic engagement - Sinbad records a funny introduction (to four reticent monks: 'Hey, my brothers, those hoods are going to wear your hair off'); subjects pose unwillingly with grimaces; subjects hear recording and laugh; Sinbad takes picture of smiling subjects; Sinbad shows picture to subjects; everyone laughs.

Polaroid would like us to believe that the technological innovation of the Talking Camera is responsible for the happy outcome, and certainly part of the camera's appeal lies in the way the photographer goes first by abstracting his own voice before abstracting the subject's image. That charm doesn't take away from the fact that it's the camera operator (Sinbad) who is committed not only to making a 'good' photograph but also to the well-being and happiness of those in it. Sinbad and Polaroid start with the dissatisfaction caused by popular media's obsession with manipulation and rebut it through a process that depends on the joys of participation and a mutually acceptable outcome.

Whether you think of it as dishonestly utopian or just plain corny, the Polaroid Talking Camera TV commercials outline the steps necessary to forge a shared identity out of difference (Sinbad is black, semi-hip-hop while all his subjects are de-fanged semi-conservative whites.) Sinbad takes the effort to imagine a mutually funny one-liner and the subjects respond by participating in his act of representation. That shared identity, difficult and fleeting, is the true subject of Sinbad's snapshots, the real political possibility of every photographic engagement, and the first step toward honest representation, whether it be photographic or political.