Cory Graves
This Weekend, North Texas Hosts The World’s First Three-Day Instant Film Convention.
Every single day here on Central Track, we highlight various things our readers can do in and around Dallas. But, sometimes, a particularly interesting event can be lost in the shuffle. Through this And Another Thing feature, we hope to give these events their due diligence by means of a little extra push.
In 2008, Polaroid announced that it would cease production of instant film.
Days before shutting down their last remaining factory, though, The Impossible Project stepped in to buy their remaining stock. Over the course of the eight years that followed, their team of chemists, engineers and photographers have reinvented Polaroid’s instant film formulas closely enough to begin producing new film for Polaroid 600-type, SX-70 and Image/Spectra cameras. And now that Fujifilm has similarly decided to wind down production on instant film for its Instax cameras, The Impossible Project and other groups are trying a similar rescue mission.
All of that is to say that there are still plenty of folks passionate about the medium of instant film. And you can bet that tons of them will be making the trek to North Texas this weekend for the world’s first three-day instant film convention, PolaCon.
Says Daniel Rodrigue, co-founder of the Instant Film Society, the local entity responsible for organizing the event, people from all over the U.S. have registered for PolaCon, including one attendee from as far away as the U.K. (Full disclosure: Rodrigue has previously contributed to Central Track, too.)
Across the Atlantic Ocean a long way to travel for a con, sure, but there’ll be plenty to do this weekend for attendees. PolaCon kicks off Friday with IFS’s fifth annual State Fair #PolaWalk, a scavenger hunt that meets up in Deep Ellum at 4 p.m., then proceeds to the fair and back.
Saturday, things move to the Evers Hardware Building in Denton, where activities will include an instant film pop-up museum, a town square PolaWalk, and a variety of workshops and demos from folks like Impossible Project’s Patrick Tobin, for instance, who will be at Denton Camera Exchange from noon to 3 p.m.
Then, on Sunday, at the Patterson-Appleton Arts Center, Jason Lee will discuss his new Refueled Magazine ONE SERIES photobook. There’ll also be a live podcast taping, a Q&A with the aforementioned Tobin, and a workshop to brainstorm ideas for next year’s PolaCon.
Yup, looks like this thing aims at becoming an annual event.
PolaCon takes place in Dallas and Denton from Friday, September 30 through Sunday, October 2. For more info, and a full rundown of the weekend’s events head here.