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Photo Galleries

Core77 Photo Gallery: The Impossible Project Factory Tour

By Core Jr - October 1, 2011

The Impossible factory is located in Building Noord (North) of the former Polaroid plant in Enschede, Netherlands.
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Factory Floor Plan. When Impossible acquired all the machinery from the Polaroid plant, they had to consolidate four buildings worth of equipment into the three floors of Building Noord.
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The last working large format 8x10 production machine was carefully relocated from Waltham (near Boston) in the US to the Impossible factory in 2009. It is planned to be put back to work once production of the PX integral film formats are running smoothly.
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One of the original Polaroid machines.
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Impossible employees Henk Minnen, Jos Bakker and Paul Latka
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Film Production Machine
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Wires on the floor
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Impossible founder Dr. Florian Kaps
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Forklift on the ground floor.
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Looking up the stairwell
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Building Noord's foyer for visitors with old furniture from an abandoned doctor's office.
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Film Production Machine
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Film Production Machine
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Third floor: The Production Hall consists of nine giant production machines, several pod filling machines, one big slitter, the reactors, two molding machines and many additional tools.
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Storage for small parts in the warehouse.
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The huge archive stores over 30,000 carefully preserved spare parts.
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The Chemical Lab: Impossible are constantly testing new formulas to improve instant film and create new blends.
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The Chemical Lab
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The Chemical Lab
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Second floor factory corridor.
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Reactor for mixing film emulsion.
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Third floor: This area is the loudest part of the factory and the machines can be heard and felt throughout the entire building.
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Impossible factory shirts.
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Film Production Machine.
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Film Production Machine.
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Internal factory telephone.
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Commemorative wall celebrating former Polaroid employees with their ID tags.
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Control Panel.
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Making adjustment to a production machine.
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Work tools
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Nico Dikken at work
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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Control Panel.
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Ventilation ducts on the factory roof.
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Wim Nijmeier, Quality Control Manager at work
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Spread sheets in the laboratory
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Factory windows
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Third floor: The reactor room
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Loading dock
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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switch on one of the production machines
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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Switch detail
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Third floor: The Production Hall
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Third floor: The Chemical Lab
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Ground Floor: Home of Jos Ridderhof, the godfather of camera repair. For many years he serviced, repaired and resurrected thousands of SX 70 cameras. Since the start of the Impossible Project he restored as many cameras as possible.
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Control panel maintenance.
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Control Panel.
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Take a look behind-the-scenes at the The Impossible Project Factory located in Enschede, a small industrial city in the far east of The Netherlands. In 2008 Impossible brokered a last-minute deal with Polaroid to purchase all the machines and equipment used to make instant integral film just before they were scrapped, and set up shop in Building Noord (North) of the former-Polaroid plant.

For those not familiar with the back story, getting the new film to market was not without it's difficulties, it was nearly impossible as Polaroid closed the chemical plant that produced their secret colored dyes almost two years earlier in anticipation of shuttering their analog business. In fact they only started dismantling the factories once all the reserves had been used up. The real challenge for the Impossible team — aside from figuring out how to modernize production — was finding a partner that could produce the chemicals necessary to make the magic of instant film work.

In March 2010, the first Impossible film — PX100 and PX600 — made it's debut, much to the relief of analog photography enthusiasts who had been stockpiling expired film in case they could never shoot their vintage Polaroid cameras again. Today the film range offered has expanded considerably with various monochromatic shades and colored blends available but the Impossible team are still hard at work perfecting the PX integral film formula. There are plans to resurrect the popular 8x10 format using the last intact production machine which was shipped from the US in late 2009, and they have started designing their own camera which will no doubt take strong cues from the iconic SX-70.

To keep our factory tour authentic, the first three quarters were shot on Impossible film and if you want to learn more about how the film is made, check out this great video from the Science Channel we posted a few months ago.

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