Andy Warhol called it his “pencil and paper.”

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders described it as “lush” and “forgiving.”

Andre 3000 advised us in his 2003 hit Hey Ya to “shake it, shake it” like, well, itself. Back when I was styling shoots for magazines, we aspiring downtown Mapplethorpes used it at work and then afterward at parties.

When John Waters – who used it to document each and every person who entered his apartment, from his friends to the exterminator – heard that Polaroid was pulling the plug on its instant film in 2008, the outré director was beside himself. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked New York magazine. “Digital isn’t instant gratification, and those cameras don’t make that sexy sound.”

“What are wardrobe departments supposed to do?” he continued. “How else will they keep costume continuity shots? And has anybody thought about the poor home-porno enthusiasts? Are they supposed to now risk arrest by taking some memory disk to the drugstore to get printed? The world is a terrible place without Polaroid.”

Ah, the poor home-porno enthusiasts. Cut to this week and the world is looking instantly brighter thanks to the Impossible Project, an endeavour founded by Austrian entrepreneur Florian Kaps, who has acquired the lease to a shuttered Polaroid factory in Enschede, the Netherlands. Now a limited edition of 700 hand-numbered deadstock Polaroid ONE600 Classic cameras, along with the last production runs of Type 779 Instant Film, are for sale at Urban Outfitters stores – with the proceeds supporting the Impossible Project’s mission to get the factory up and running and producing Polaroid film again in 2010.

It’s a project more challenging than one might think, given that the necessary chemicals and processes involved must be largely reinvented, since a good measure of the original Polaroid factory ended up in the dumpster. Nevertheless, the photographic community – which has been hoarding any last 10-packs of instant film it could find on the dusty shelves of small-town drugstores and driving up the prices for same on eBay since Polaroid’s 2008 shutdown – is literally counting the minutes till P-day on the Impossible Project’s website clock.

Toronto photographer Susan Gouinlock, who still cherishes her two old Polaroid cameras, was thrilled to hear the news. “Sometimes with digital, because it’s another step away from the original image, and also perhaps because it’s infinitely reproducible, there is this sense of having lost some of the immediacy,” says Gouinlock, who uses digital herself. “Polaroids, on the other hand, because they are singular, have a direct relationship to the truth.”

Whether or not such technical authenticity is front of mind to the Luddite hipsters who already shop for such anachronisms as Olivetti typewriters and vinyl LPs is beside the point. Like farmers’ markets hawking artisanal breads and groovy stationers stocked with hand-pressed stationery, the spate of recent gallery shows of Polaroid images point to a larger yearning for the offbeat clunkiness of a time before mass perfection was achievable with the click of a mouse.

Kaps, who has been selling artists’ Polaroid work online at www.polanoid.net since 2005, is not stuck in a 20th-century technology, but inspired by its potential. “This project is about building a very interesting business,” he told The New York Times. “It is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world.”

As Kaps would no doubt be the first to agree, old-school Polaroids are now unnecessary (after all, the company makes instant cellphone-sized digital printers). But it is precisely its needlessness that makes it desirable to the 21st-century cultural connoisseur. And, clearly, there is an attraction to the passé form as artifact, admired for its strange, now otherworldly beauty alone.

“There is something vulnerable in a Polaroid picture,” observes Gouinlock. “Its surface is like the top of a glassy pond or like human skin. It was naive, but it depended on whose hands it was in. Nobody ever put it on a tripod. And the colour saturation right away had this reminiscent quality, the colours faded like it was 10 years old.”

And what could provide a better example of a cultural souvenir for the cognoscenti than a form of photography? As the late Susan Sontag theorized prophetically in her landmark 1973 On Photography, “it is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. … All photographs are memento mori.”

Corporate dinosaurs like Polaroid may be too slow to recognize the cachet of a dying format in a digital age, but the good news, courtesy of the likes of Urban Outfitters, Florian Kaps and the Impossible Project, is that we might not be writing the obituary for all sorts of supposedly dying art forms just yet. The passé, if not the past, can live on, repackaged as an artifact. Its recherché charm is precisely the appeal for an emerging niche market whose appreciation might even one day extend to such outmoded, unnecessary concepts as, say, the printed page.