The Polaroid Book. 45th Ed.

It sits in the hand like a paving stone, a compact hardcover thick enough to feel like an object instead of a catalogue. TASCHEN's small format is doing something deliberate here. A survey of the instant photograph, the most disposable image any camera ever made, gets bound into the densest and most permanent shape on the shelf, and the joke lands the moment you pick it up.

Inside is a greatest-hits pull from the Polaroid Collection, the trove of work the company amassed for decades by handing artists free film and asking for prints in return. The arrangement produced one of the strangest patronage systems in photographic history, and the harvest is astonishing in its spread. Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, William Wegman, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, the canonical names appear beside amateurs, anonymous test shots, and technicians who were only ever trying to check a film batch.

It helps to remember what a strange invention this was. Edwin Land's instant system compressed the darkroom into a pod of chemistry and a small motor, delivering a finished print in the time it takes to find your keys. The SX-70 that produced many of these frames was a folding reflex that pushed a developing square out into daylight, engineering so improbable it still looks like a magic trick. The pictures here were made by people discovering, in real time, what such a machine was good for beyond snapshots.

That range is the whole argument, whether the volume states it or not. An instant print flattens the hierarchy between the master and the hobbyist, because the same little chemical rectangle develops in the same ninety seconds for everyone. Warhol's snapshots of the famous and a stranger's picture of a backyard occupy the identical format, and the format turns out to hold more than its throwaway reputation ever promised.

The medium's specific qualities come through even at reduced size. The soft, slightly unreal color. The dark saturated borders of the SX-70 frame. The way instant film renders skin and light with a chemistry that never quite behaves, blooming and shifting in ways a photographer learns to court rather than correct.

Chuck Close built monumental grids from these small squares. Hockney assembled them into fractured composite portraits no single exposure could capture. The survey keeps circling one discovery: constraint breeds invention, and few formats constrain as cheerfully as this one.

The context around the pictures gives the collection an elegiac charge it lacked when first published. Polaroid stopped making film in 2008, the corporate collection was broken up and auctioned in bankruptcy, and instant photography spent years looking like a closed chapter before a stubborn revival brought the film back. Paging through now, you are looking at both a living medium and its own near-obituary, which sharpens every frame.

Instant film also carries a working history that outlasts the art. For decades it was the set photographer's proofing tool, the way a crew checked light and composition before committing to costly film, and that utilitarian lineage hums quietly under the artful frames. The through-line is immediacy, a photograph you can hand across a table while the moment is still warm. A studio owner who has watched a client's face light up at a print instead of a screen knows exactly what that immediacy is worth.

The medium's grand end gets a nod too, the room-sized 20x24 camera a few studios still guard, whose life-size instant prints turned painters and sculptors into portraitists for a day. Between that behemoth and a shirt-pocket snapshot lies the entire improbable range of one chemistry.

Honesty requires naming what a survey like this cannot do. Breadth is its method and also its ceiling. No single artist gets enough room to build a full case, the sequencing favors delight over any strict thesis, and the compact format shrinks images some of these photographers meant to be seen large. It is an anthology of a medium, not a deep study of any one practitioner, and a reader wanting the latter should treat it as an index of where to look next.

What it does, it does with real generosity. It makes the case for instant film as a serious artistic instrument and not a novelty, and it does so by sheer accumulation, letting a hundred small squares argue collectively what no wall text could.

Which returns you to the object in your hand, that improbable little brick. A throwaway medium pressed into the sturdiest form TASCHEN makes, as if to insist that the fastest, most disposable pictures ever taken were always worth keeping.