Polaroid Type 59

Type 59 was Polaroid's 4x5 sheet color instant, part of the Polacolor ER family. It loaded one frame at a time into a Polaroid 545 holder, exposed in any standard 4x5 view camera, and peeled apart sixty seconds later as a finished color print. The negative half got tossed, since this was a print-only workflow, not a positive/negative system like Type 55.

ISO 80 daylight sat the film in roughly the same exposure neighborhood as a slide on a sunny day, which made bracketing with an incident meter straightforward. Tonal scale ran medium contrast with the warm, slightly muted palette that defined Polacolor ER across formats. Skin tones came back with a peach cast that some photographers loved and others corrected for. Reds rendered closer to brick than fire engine.

The artist use case mattered more than commercial work by the end. Image transfer and emulsion lift were the things Type 59 was bought for. Expose normally, start the development clock, peel at twenty to thirty seconds before full development, and press the negative half onto watercolor paper to lift wet dyes onto a different substrate. Type 59 and its 100-series cousin Type 669 were the standard stocks for this work until they went away.

Polaroid discontinued Type 59 in 2008 alongside the wider closure of its instant film operations. New old stock surfaces on the secondhand market with expiration dates from 2008 and 2009; prices have crept upward year over year. Compared with the Fujifilm FP-100C45 pack film that briefly filled the gap, Type 59 had a softer color response and was easier to control for transfers.

Format was 4x5 only, sold in twenty-sheet boxes. Discontinued in 2008.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, but with a 1.0 exponent the metered time is essentially the shot time. For art-technique work where peel timing mattered more than exposure precision, that simplicity helped. Bracket if the freezer-stock you're using is more than ten years past expiry.