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Launched in October 2010 with thirteen employees, Instagram quickly grew to over thirty million users by early 2012, when it made the news for being acquired by Facebook for one billion dollars.1 The app's acquisition by Facebook inspired a profusion of online articles and blog entries obsessed with enumeration-thirteen employees, thirty million users, one billion dollars-as well as comparisons of Instagram to Kodak from the standpoints of both technological and economic innovation.2 These comparisons attempt to explore why Instagram was so successful at the very moment Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but they are interesting less for their descriptions of evolving business models than for their historical accounts connecting outmoded analog processes to newer photographic technologies. As Instagram turns eight years old, with billions of photos to its name and millions more uploaded every day, the app has proven its staying power by cornering the market as the most employed means of sharing and archiving vernacular photography today.
Many of the online news articles and blog entries over the past several years comparing Instagram to Kodak missed a more apt comparison. Although Instagram's name is reminiscent of Kodak's Instamadc camera, introduced in 1963, Instagram's original logo was based on the Polaroid OneStep camera, an original model of which graced its offices.3 This design and marketing decision crystallized into a single icon: Instagram's mode of appropriating the look of analog photography from the mid-twentieth century. There is no material reason why Instagram images should look like analog photographs: like any digital image, Instagram photos are composed of binary code translated to RGB pixels, while analog Kodak and Polaroid photos are composed of light-sensitive chemistry with paper supports. From a material viewpoint, digital and analog photographs could be considered not to be the same medium at all, pointing to a plurality of photographic media. So why did Instagram, especially at its outset, so emphatically emulate the look of analog photographic processes?
While the Polaroid SX-70, released in 1972, was the first camera to fulfill Polaroid co-founder and longtime CEO Edwin Land's vision of "absolute one-step photography,"4 it was the Polaroid OneStep of 1977 with its iconic rainbow stripe that became the face of Polaroid-and then the face of Instagram. Polaroid's near-instantaneity of obtaining a finished print...