Christopher Bonanos > Quotes

“As late as 2003, the hip-hop star Andre 3000 could sing “Shake it like a Polaroid picture,” in Outkast’s megahit “Hey Ya,” and even young people did not have to ask what he meant.1”
― Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid

“Another time, when a shareholder questioned how much he was spending on product development, he was even more dismissive: “The bottom line,” he said, “is in heaven.” Romantic utopianism lay at the very core of what was soon to be a billion-dollar business.”
― Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid

“It was to be called Polasound, and the idea was truly eccentric: to attach an audio caption to each Polaroid integral picture. The idea seems to have been that you’d clip your picture into a little plastic carrier that held a strip of audiotape. For recording and playback, you’d pop each one into what looked like a small radio with a slot on top. The gizmo never got past the drawing board, but it’s one of the most bewitchingly weird notions Polaroid ever considered.”
― Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid

“Somehow, though, people still think that Polaroid pictures inevitably degrade. It may be that the instant nature of the film makes it seem ephemeral or fragile. A 1980 song by the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg contains the lines, “The Polaroids that hold us together / Will surely fade away.” They don’t have to, though. Many of the first tests, from 1944, look just fine.”
― Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid

“Late in the afternoon, he headed to Sammy’s with Louis Liotta, where they knew they could get help from a female pal of Weegee’s. (Her name is lost to history, but the photojournalist Sam Vandivert later said he knew her,”
― Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous