I’ve started to let my oldest son use a Polaroid camera. We want our kids to learn to be mindful of the world they inhabit and to take in moments that become links in the chain of family memory. Photography is a good way to see things in a different light and cherish them.   

However, we firmly believe screens are portals to the netherworld, and most people take pictures with their smartphones now. According to one study, about 90 percent of photos are taken with smartphones. In a rearguard effort to save the minds, bodies, and souls of our little ones from digital damnation, we want to buck that trend for as long as we can.  

I happen to think instant cameras are a very underappreciated medium. Well, maybe less underappreciated these days, as Polaroid is making a comeback after filing for bankruptcy twice between 2001 and 2009. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward nostalgia, making all things new again.  

In the 12 months ending September 2016, Polaroid sales surged 166 percent, with more than 3.5 million units sold. The cameras have been modernized, of course. The Polaroid Pop, for example, incorporates modern digital technology while remaining true to what makes the brand iconic: point, shoot, print, and share. It was more social than the modern social networks through which our digital pictures are shared. Indeed, it seems more “in the moment,” more human, than what you experience with technologically superior devices, which have become instruments of artifice and distraction in the hands of users who obsess over angles and pixels and orientation. It’s less about capturing a scene than it is about creating one, which is then subjected to filtering and editing, making the photograph more perfect than reality even.   

There’s something deeply pleasing about the ethereal imperfections of instant film. Flaws in the film don’t feel as such when you’re touching them. They’re balmy and ghostly, like memories enshrouded by mists and recollected against the vastness of space and time. Beyond a longing for simpler days, the appeal of this medium rests precisely in the fact that it does not attempt to perfectly render real life. It is refreshingly flawed, or, as Friedrich Georg Jünger might say, it breaks the clock.  

“How clockwork-like is not the whole order of modern civilization, how relentlessly does not technical progress strive to subject everything to this clocklike precision: man’s sleep, his work, his rest, and his pleasures!” Jünger wrote in The Failure of Technology.  

I suspect Polaroid’s resurrection is fueled, in part, by a desire to reject that relentless drive toward “clocklike precision” that culminates in technology bringing us to a point where we are no longer able to distinguish between reality and representation. At the time of its inception, Polaroid was considered cutting edge. But the irony of its comeback is owed to the fact that it is now far from that. Artificial intelligence can already produce images of people too perfect to actually exist. Instant cameras can make no such claims of immaculate presentation. In that way, it could be said they have more fidelity to the human than their more advanced counterparts.  

When my son snapped his first set of Polaroids, he wanted to see them right away. I explained to him that it takes time for them to develop, so we read bedtime stories for about half an hour, a bit longer than it typically takes for them to finish baking. He liked the idea of coming back to check on them and see his handiwork. When we did, a few photos came out blurry, a little finger visible on the corner of one, some ectoplasmic effects resulting from the chemical pods leaking in another. In the rest, his siblings and mother look angelic, frozen in the milky ether contained within those white lines, like a snapshot from a dream. They’re perfectly imperfect. We’re keeping all of them and putting them in a scrapbook.