Polaroidisation

Abstract

Based on the work of the Polish photographer Wacław Nowak, who had the opportunity to photograph with an American Polaroid camera in the midst of the Cold War, this article focuses on the political entanglement of various materials and things identified with Western culture. Polaroidisation, as used in the title of the text, is the equivalent of the terms McDonaldisation or Coca-colonisation, which appear in treatises on American economic and political expansion. The subject of the text has become the entanglement of instant photographic techniques in the cultural rivalry of warring blocs of states. Like the famous exhibition The Family of Man (MoMA, 1955), which toured the world, repeatedly crossing the borders of the Iron Curtain, Polaroid materials and process were used as a tools of Western propaganda, promoting American values and technological inventions.