Here’s how India is warming up to instant film cameras

Your smartphone can take a photograph with its inbuilt camera, but can it also print one? That is where instant cameras score brownie points. The return of all things retro may have catalysed their popularity, but it would be naïve to believe that instant cameras and films are a thing of past. They have been around in India for over a decade now and shutterbugs are clinging to them for the aesthetic, tactile quality they bring to photographs.

Your smartphone can take a photograph with its inbuilt camera, but can it also print one? That is where instant cameras score brownie points. The return of all things retro may have catalysed their popularity, but it would be naïve to believe that instant cameras and films are a thing of past. They have been around in India for over a decade now and shutterbugs are clinging to them for the aesthetic, tactile quality they bring to photographs.

Chennai-based photographer Radha Rathi defines her artsy explorations with the Fuji Instax camera, gifted to her by her photographer friend Madhavan Palanisamy on her birthday, as “sheer joy”.

In 2015, when she set out to click pictures for Puducherry-based fashion designer Naushad Ali’s Spring-Summer campaign ’16, she opted for an instant camera. “Naushad’s signature style is easy and relaxed, yet warm and colourful. I wanted to replicate that ease, which comes naturally to shooting with instant cameras. You don’t have to create an artificial setting with lighting and other props. Instant films are a mood, with warm-toned, nostalgia-infused hues peculiar to Polaroids,” she says.

Eight years later, Radha’s love for instant cameras has not faded. She used them in a project for Calcutta-based fashion brand Aish in 2022 and shot a new series with them last year in Sri Lanka.

Instant films and cameras were introduced and popularised by a Massachusetts-based company, Polaroid, in the 1940s. The company saw meteoric success in the ’70s, before it got buried in debt during the ’80s and filed for bankruptcy in the early 2000s. Its resurrection in 2008 by the Impossible Project, rebranded as Polaroid in 2020, catalysed the return of instant cameras.

Polaroid has not forayed into India yet, but the country’s instant camera market seems to be bustling. “Presently, Fujifilm and Lomography are the sole brands offering instant cameras and films in India. We are observing a 30%-40% annual growth in instant camera sales. The majority prefers Fujifilm Instax. The sales of Lomography cameras are lower,” says Raychand Jain, proprietor of Foto Trade, Chennai.

“I saw my first instant photo as a child in my dad’s collection, sent by his pen-pal from the US. Years later, maybe in 2011, I purchased a used Polaroid camera from a thrift store in the US but it stopped working after a few months,” recollects Gayatri Nair, co-director of Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB).