In the wake of instant film’s sud­den demise, this week a group of enthu­si­asts announced an unusual grass-roots effort to build a bet­ter Polaroid. Named for a famous Edwin Land quote (“Don’t under­take a project unless it is man­i­festly impor­tant and nearly impos­si­ble”), The Impos­si­ble Project is a hand­ful of sci­en­tists and engi­neers in the Nether­lands who are seri­ous about bring­ing a new Polaroid-compatible inte­gral film pack to mass pro­duc­tion. To this end, they have rented one of Polaroid’s old assem­bly build­ings and pur­chased all the spe­cial­ized equip­ment con­tained therein.

I wish they would start by re-inventing peel-apart pack film (which I use with large-format cam­eras), but given the pop­u­lar­ity of inte­gral film it’s a sound deci­sion and I’ll take what I can get!