Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

Read

May 8, 2008 • KR Blog • Uncategorized

God Save Little Shops, China Cups and Virginity and Polaroid Film

By Heather Christle

[Note: After writing this, I realized that apparently it is the Death of Old Technology Week at KR. Thematic!]

Doom! Doom! Call the Kinks! Polaroid will soon stop manufacturing its instant film. Of course nostalgia is one of the most unpleasant poses one can strike (and I have no plans to try to make my computer look like it was designed by H.G. Wells), but this news is wearing my heart out. Why?

There are so many reasons to love a Polaroid. They are so tender. There is only ever one of them. It is not their immediacy, but their vulnerability that I find so appealing. It means something to give a Polaroid away, to relinquish that particular frame of that particular moment to another human being. Polaroids! You can become lost! You can disappear forever in a way that pixels just cannot. It seems like a Polaroid picture could be capable of restoring some of the ritual aspects that Benjamin says art has escaped in “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

…for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice ??? politics.

And I love that frame, that elegant white space, so perfectly proportioned and inviting. It sets one’s thumbs at ease–so kind! So human! An airy waiting room to rest in while the image develops, swells from a foggy dawn into the odd darkness and definition of light. Or later, maybe, the invitation shifts, suggests the space might be receptive to being written upon: a date, a name, an unrelated message.

Oh and the sounds that pour out of that machine! The whir, the click, the hum–sometimes I want to take a picture just for the music of it. If you go here you can listen to (and watch) Andy Warhol play with his Polaroid. We can’t ask Warhol for his take on the death of the medium, but if you go here you can find Chuck Close and other photographers despondantly responding.

I am going to go hoard some film, but I’ll leave you back in the hands of the Kinks, who are directing us into the future.

The Kenyon Review was founded in 1939. The resources for the new literary journal were provided by Gordon Keith Chalmers, President of Kenyon College, while the inspiration to establish the journal and raise the national stature of the institution had come from his wife Roberta Teale Swartz, herself a poet and a friend and protege of Robert Frost. Frost encouraged the idea and visited Kenyon more than once. The poet and critic John Crowe Ransom was recruited to Kenyon by Chalmers with the express purpose in mind of his launching a distinguished magazine. During his 21-year tenure, Ransom published such internationally known writers as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Delmore Schwartz, as well as younger writers: Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell, and Peter Taylor, to name a few. It was perhaps the best known and most influential literary magazine in the English-speaking world during the 1940s and '50s. In 1969, discouraged by the quarterly's financial burdens and sagging reputation, Kenyon College ceased publication of The Kenyon Review. The journal was revived in 1979, and in June 1990, internationally acclaimed poet and editor Marilyn Hacker was hired as the Review's first full-time (and first female) editor. She quickly broadened the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints. In April 1994, the trustees directed that The Kenyon Review be continued, but with significant cost-reducing and revenue-enhancing initiatives. Hacker left and David Lynn (acting editor in 1989-90), Kenyon English professor, was named editor on a two-thirds time basis. The magazine's financial picture has since stabilized and improved dramatically. The creation of a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees and a renewed commitment by Kenyon College combined to guarantee the financial health of the Review and to free its editors to pursue increased excellence. Such is the status of The Kenyon Review today.
Back to top