This year, the Impossible Project launched the Silver Shade Tour and hit the open road, stopping in at photography shops across the west, holding workshops and demos in hopes of inspiring a new found love for the seemingly lost art of analog photography. When the Impossible Airstream pulled into pictureline on May 30th, excitement was high when customers arrived with hammy-down Polaroid cameras looking to create new art with something left to collect dust on a shelf. Set up inside the Airstream was a miniature lab where you could learn to create emulsion lifts, be given a demonstration on how to use that old SX-70 that you never thought worked, and have a couple pictures taken by Kyle and Mitch, the main men behind the wheel of the Impossible Projects Airstream.
Bridging the gap between digital and analog is the Impossibles Instant Lab, the big hit of the Silver Shade Tour. Designed without any unnecessary dials, buttons and controls, the Instant Lab brings analog technique to a modern device. Instant photos from your iPhone 4/4S, iPhone 5/5S or iPod Touch can now be turned into tangible photographs by taking the image from your iPhone's display and developed through the photochemical process using Impossible film which results in the unique analog photo of a genuine Polaroid.
Whether you consider yourself a traditional analog or a diehard digital photographer, the Impossible Project has room for everyone. By purchasing the last factory in the world to manufacture instant film, Impossible is the only company to produce film for Polaroid cameras, restore and refurbish cameras in their own workshops in the U.S. and Europe, and inventing the Instant Lab device that creates digital images into analog photographs. In just over two years, Impossible has done the incredible; their aim was to simply save 200 million Polaroid instant cameras from becoming useless, a feat that was practically impossible. But that was probably the point.
