3 Quotes by Christopher Bonanos

It was to be called Polasound, and the idea was truly eccentric: to attach an audio caption to each Polaroid integral picture. The idea seems to have been that you’d clip your picture into a little plastic carrier that held a strip of audiotape. For recording and playback, you’d pop each one into what looked like a small radio with a slot on top. The gizmo never got past the drawing board, but it’s one of the most bewitchingly weird notions Polaroid ever considered.

Another time, when a shareholder questioned how much he was spending on product development, he was even more dismissive: “The bottom line,” he said, “is in heaven.” Romantic utopianism lay at the very core of what was soon to be a billion-dollar business.

As late as 2003, the hip-hop star Andre 3000 could sing “Shake it like a Polaroid picture,” in Outkast’s megahit “Hey Ya,” and even young people did not have to ask what he meant.1.