For anyone who was young -- or at least felt young -- in the eighties, the recent news that Polaroid would soon discontinue all production of instant film was akin to being yanked out of summer camp early. What would happen to all the memories? Fortunately, the folks at savepolaroid.com are on the case. The organization's goal is to find another company to keep churning out the insta-presto film packs. Help convince Ilford or Fuji to take up the torch by posting your favorite polaroid snapshots on Save Polaroid's Flickr page, or just peruse the gallery for a nostalgic reminder of what picture taking was like before the age of the four gigabyte memory card. --SARA JAMES

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While modern air travel may not be as alluring as it once was, unlocking the mystique surrounding the well-manicured women (and men) in charge of our safety and comfort in the sky is still enticing, and now it's possible.

In the book Flight Attendants, photographer Brian Finke chronicles the lives of flight crews around the world. Finke began his work in the United States, flying numerous airlines domestically, from Delta to Southwest. He then moved on to Europe, boarding British Airways and Air France flights, among others. Later, he visited a flight attendant school where he photographed the flight crew practicing their emergency procedures -- giving safety demonstrations, putting out fires, and inflating slide rafts. He also visited Asia and ended the worldwide jaunt on Icelandair.

Finke spent two-years traversing the globe to capture both public and private moments, from preparing food in the galley to applying make up, shooting pool and smoking cigarettes. Finke, with his eye for fashion, captures an image of air travel that is unlike what some may imagine in the days of low-fare cattle cars and few amenities in the sky. In one image reminiscent of a runway show, Tiger Airways crewmembers descend the roll-up stairs onto the tarmac, proudly displaying their white blouses, black pencil skirts and black and orange Tiger Airways scarves.

Finke's past work has covered a wide range of subjects but he focuses on team dynamics in much of his photography. Some of his past work has included photos of baseball and football players, cheerleaders and fraternity brothers. Along with the release of the monograph, an exhibition of Finke's work from Flight Attendants opened at ClampArt in New York on Thursday, February 21.

With Alix Browne, deputy style editor of The New York Times Magazine, and Alison Nordström, Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, contributing, Flight Attendants is sure to be good reading material the next time you're at a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft and may be the best way to recall the romance of air travel. --BRANDON FELDMAN

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MV STAT: On May 15, 1930, a registered nurse named Ellen Church became the world's first airline stewardess, working a route from Oakland to Chicago...

(Burckhardt, "Astor Place" 1947, gelatin-silver print, 7 3⁄8 x 7 1⁄2 inches)

Rudy Burckhardt moved from Switzerland to New York in 1935, when he was 21, and liked what he found.  He befriended leading artists and poets and his photographs of New York serve as a history of his adapted city.  A new exhibition at Museum of the City of New York reminds us that he combined careful social observation with a powerful sense of formalism. 

(Burckhardt, "Flat Iron in Summer" 1947, gelatin-silver print, 11 x 9 inches)

His black and white photographs are small, usually around the size of a book, yet they are exceptionally engrossing -- every inch of a print is revealing.  Today's New Yorkers may be surprised to find that the city once contained subways with upholstered seats, barbers offering shaves for less than a quarter, and tobacconists selling Cuban cigars. But some things remain the same: The Flatiron Building still looks great, women everywhere wear smart shoes, and the views down the canyons of buildings towards the Hudson River are still inspiring. 

(Burckhardt, "Times Building" ca. 1948, gelatin-silver print, 9 x 7 inches)

During his six decades in the Big Apple, Burckhardt accepted how the city and its people changed remarkably.  And ultimately it's his humanity that makes him, even almost a decade after his death, very much an artist of our time. -- DAVID COGGINS

(All photos courtesy of the Estate of Rudy Burckhardt and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York)

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MV STAT: In 1901, New York became the first state to require license plates on cars...

When the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) was established in 1991 inside the grand, gray confines of Dublin's seventeenth-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham, perhaps no one predicted that 17 years later, a major retrospective of two contemporary artists would call into question the entire notion of modernity and contemporaneity -- not to mention of installing white-cube spaces in a building founded during the reign of Charles II.  But with the February 5 opening of An Amusing Experience of Chemistry: Photographs 1990-1890 by the American-born art duo McDermott and McGough, IMMA seemed to be inching back toward its pre-modern roots:  Four seldom-used rooms, complete with period detail, fireplaces, and wall and floor treatments rigged up by the artists were filled with McDermott and McGough's startling photographs from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  These could just as easily have been, as the show's subtitle suggests, from the 1880s and 1890s, having been taken with huge, antiquated cameras (some of which were parked liked parlor curiosities in the exhibition rooms) and processed by extremely old-school means:  palladium, cyanotype, salt, and gum-bichromate printing.

Appropriately, the well-attended opening was kicked off by a few words from the Hon. Desmond Guinness, the 76-year-old brewing scion, son of Lady Diana Mitford, and founder, in 1958, of the robust Irish Georgian Society, one of the premier historic preservation organizations in the world.  As he impishly sounded alarm bells about the appearance of giant mechanical cranes on the horizon surrounding IMMA -- "skeletons" he called them, harbingers of deathly visual pollution in the form of encroaching modernity -- he was ringed by an amused international crowd that included the likes of Paris gallerist Jerome de Noirmont; Zurich art dealer Andrea Caratsch; writer Tom Sykes and his wife, the designer Sasha Sykes; New York gallerist Nicholas Robinson; William Burlington, the son of the Duke of Devonshire; and David McDermott and Peter McGough themselves, dressed, as is their custom, in evening wear that would not have caused any second looks in the first-class dining room of the Titanic.  Concluding his inaugural remarks, Guinness turned toward the artists (who first moved from New York to Dublin in the early nineties, although McGough has since moved back) and sized up the improbable, 21st-century-defying figures they cut:  "I want to... be you," he said.

McDermott, top hat, spats, and all, belted out a response that seemed to reflect not only the feelings of two artists enjoying a big show in their adopted city, but the collective yearnings of the Dublin crowd:  "We love you!  You're our hero!  We want to be you!"

An Amusing Experience of Chemistry: Photographs 1990-1890 is on view until April 27. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, Ireland; +353-1-6129900 www.modernart.ie. --MARK ROZZO

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MV STAT:  In 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease on an unused brewery at St. James's Gate, Dublin for an initial £100 and an annual rent of £45...

Like a libidinous Willy Wonka, Pirelli has at last invited visitors into the rarefied pages of their supermodel-stuffed calendar. Once as celebrated for their exclusivity as for exotic beauty, the Pirelli is increasingly available through such great societal levelers as eBay and Amazon.com. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Rizzoli International has compiled the annual objects of desire into a book heavy enough to splinter many a coffee table.  The 639-page Complete Pirelli Calendars ($85; available March 11) includes all 800 cardiac arrest-inducing photographs from 1964 through 2007, plus those from the never-before-released 1963 prototype.

The seductive waltz of model and photographer -- Christy Turlington, as seen through Richard Avedon's lens, for example -- provides each image with a sultry, tropical tension. (If these were films, you'd probably find them in the "Over 18" section.) In fiery color or suggestive black and white, often adorned with fantastical sets and costumes, the calendars capably captured the allure of models both contemporary and classic. Think of it as a four-decade long slide show from some of this century's most accomplished fantasy mongers -- now conveniently unencumbered by all those distracting dentist appointments you marked on the originals. --TIM DEVANE

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MVSTAT: Pirelli made a name for itself during the Peking to Paris race in 1907. It supplied tires to Prince Scipione Borghese, who won the 10,000 mile race in an Itala. The prize was a magnum of champagne...

For many fans, America's favorite sporting events can provide a beer-and-peanut soaked escape from everyday life. That was certainly true in 1970, a year when the U.S. expanded its involvement in Southeast Asia amid mass protests like Kent State and mounting racial and sexual tensions. In this setting photographer Tod Papageorge turned his lens on the sports arena. His unsettling black-and-white photographs are published together for the first time in American Sports, 1970, or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam  (Aperture, $50).

There is an oppressive weight to these images, at times eased by an ironic sense of humor: well-coiffed cheerleaders practicing under the watchful eye of policemen; kids crowding around a concession stand, one wearing a shirt with the words "fly the friendly skies of Viet Nam"; and bleachers full with both bored Naval officers and fans writhing in despair and jubilation. With a country at war, Papageorge's portrayal of spectator sports reveals a maddening crowd, both helpless and somehow to blame. --TASHA GREEN

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MVSTAT: Slazenger has provided tennis balls for Wimbledon for 105 years, making it the longest partnership in sporting goods history. The British equipment maker will provide 52,000 balls for this year's tournament...