‘It’s capture the world at all costs’: The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement’s Tactics of Refusal

In the second half of the twentieth century, Polaroid transformed photography, fostering new modes of social and aesthetic engagement. To Edwin Land, the Polaroid Corporation’s founder, instant film revolutionised photographic vision, cultivating ‘a new intimacy’ between photographer and world. There was, as he stated, ‘nothing between your perception of the scene and capturing it’. While Polaroid achieved renown as an amateur tool, this article upends popular understandings of instant photography by tracing its industrial uses – particularly its deployment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. The article foregrounds the work of photographer Ken Williams and chemist Caroline Hunter, employees of the Polaroid Corporation who uncovered the sale of Polaroid films and cameras to South Africa and founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM), the first anti-apartheid boycott movement against a US company. Analysing the PRWM’s ephemera and their critique of the ID-2 camera, Polaroid’s most successful industrial product, this article demonstrates how workers within the photography industry unmasked and subverted the medium’s ‘services’. Rather than aid and abet the operations of instant capture, Williams and Hunter practised an ethics of spectatorship in solidarity with photography’s subjects and enacted tactics of refusal that resonate with photography studies today.