People forget what 1970s Britain really sounded like. It wasn’t all clattering platform shoes, R2-D2 bleeps, and pop groups making Christmas records. There was also a continual clicking and whirring, and the noise of fresh wet photographs being shaken vigorously in the air. It was the heyday of the Polaroid instant camera, when few domestic objects escaped photographic attention and you didn’t have to schlep to the developers to see the results. The camera had originally been launched as far back as 1948, invented by the American scientist Edwin H Land, but it took the refinements of the SX-70 model in 1972 to make it a full-blown craze.

Though he was a brilliant and driven man – who also developed “smart bombs” for the military – Land is unlikely to have foreseen all of the professional applications of his instant-photo machine. The police started using it for snapping apprehended criminals. Anthropologists found it handy for documenting mummies in situ in the Peruvian jungle. Many celebrity photographers used it to take quick test snaps of their subjects before they started pointing their much more expensive cameras. And modern artists went nuts over it. Andy Warhol loved Polaroids as a medium for portraiture, as an exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery currently proves, and Patti Smith recently exhibited her Polaroids of Wittgenstein’s gravestone and Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers. The cartoonist Ralph Steadman subverted the medium in the 1980s by smearing the prints before they were dry, to produce hideous images of Margaret Thatcher, Joan Collins and Satan.

Goodness knows how much home pornography has been made on Polaroids, ever since schoolboys realised they could make rude pictures without the assistants at Boots laying eyes on them. In 1963 a series of scandalous Polaroids showing the Duchess of Argyll pleasuring a mysterious man came to light during her divorce case. And earlier this year the News of the World said an unnamed “famous talent show judge” was asking his or her party guests to bring Polaroids of their private parts, so they could be mixed up for the whole room to play “Guess the Bits”.

Sadly, Polaroid film will soon be just a memory. Its manufacturer has announced that it is “transitioning from its analogue instant film business”, because digital cameras have turned Polaroids into an anachronism. The decision has prompted an outcry from aficionados around the world. Websites have sprung up to mourn the medium, petitions have been signed, and now a British gallery is staging a timely exhibition. The AOP Gallery, the shop window of the Association of Photographers, is showing hundreds of its members’ finest Polaroid shots. Speaking to some of the contributing photographers, one becomes aware of how loved this doomed medium is. “Polaroid has a continuous tonal quality like nothing else,” says David Scheinmann, who took the Polaroid of the Chinese albino model on page 33. “They are without grain, completely smooth, and not the world according to Kodak.”

“They’re intrinsically beautiful,” agrees Rob Brimson, who took the Polaroid of a printer throwing old-fashioned letter blocks in the air (page 35) as a guide shot during the construction of a complex photomontage advertisement in 1990. “Back then, I’d routinely shoot the things and toss them in the bin. And now, when you find the odd Polaroid you’ve saved, it’s like finding Granny’s photo album.”

“Often I’d do a whole shoot,” says Jillian Edelstein (whose Polaroid of Helena Bonham Carter appears on this page), “and I’d fail to recapture the magic of that Polaroid test shot.”

Five years ago, the rap band Outkast had a huge hit with the song Hey Ya!, which invited listeners to “shake it like a Polaroid picture”. Even the hippest kids hearing the song in a few years’ time will probably wonder what the hell they were singing about.

The polaroid retrospective exhibition is open now until November 14 at the AOP Gallery, 81 Leonard St, London EC2, Monday to Friday, 10am-6pm, and until 9pm on Thursday, November 6. Admission free. Tel: 020 7739 6669; www.the-aop.org

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