Working and Playing with Polaroids:
The History of Polaroid (1978)
by Rob Asher (NYU Cinema Studies)
Despite the widely-reported resurgence in analog photography (including Polaroid instant-film) in the 2020s, the Polaroid is still associated with its heyday in the 1970s. Just before its popularity was beginning to wane, the Polaroid Corporation made an in-house motion picture about its camera and company. The History of Polaroid (1978) wasn’t intended for theatrical release or broadcast. Few people outside the company have seen it. But scholar Patrick Ellis has.
He saw the only-known copy when researching the corporate records, held at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library. Thanks to his initiative, the library is providing access to the twenty-minute “house” documentary (as he calls it) for the Orphan Film Symposium session Technologies at Play. Ellis’s talk, “Industrializing Vision,” precedes the rare screening.
With the acquisition of the company’s archive, the Baker Library Historical Collection created an in-depth online exhibit in 2016. At the Intersection of Science and Art – Edwin H. Land & the Polaroid Corporation remains available as a research resource. There we learn much about the inventions that preceded the iconic square photographs.
Land founded the corporation in 1937 and even before the United States entered World War II, Polaroid “began producing polarizing filters for gunsights, binoculars, periscopes, rangefinders, and infra-red night viewing devices. With variable density goggles, anti-aircraft and machine gunners could darken the field of vision to the desired degree by turning.” During the war, the exhibit reports, it created a stereo-photographic process called Vectograph, which “consisted of an image for the left eye and another image for the right eye laminated one on top of the other on a single strip of film.”
After the war, Dr. Land turned his attention to photography. The idea of instant photography, he later wrote, had come to him all at once in 1943.
I recall a sunny vacation day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when my little daughter asked why she could not see at once the picture I had just taken of her. As I walked around that charming town I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set me. Within the hour, the camera, the film, and the physical chemistry became so clear to me. that with a great sense of excitement I hurried over to the place where Donald Brown, our Patent Attorney (in Santa Fe by coincidence) was staying, to describe to him in great detail a dry camera which would give a picture immediately after exposure.
Edwin H. Land, “On Some Conditions for Scientific Profundity in Industrial Research,” address at the PTC [Patent, Trademark and Copyright] Research Institute, Washington, DC, June 17, 1965; published in the PTC journal IDEA, vol. 9 (1965).
Thus was Polaroid transformed into a popular brand of instant photo.
However, the Polaroid camera did not take off until the 1960s, hitting its peak in the late 70s. The appeal of the camera was of course that photos instantly developed. People would no longer have to wait for rolls of 35mm film to be developed by a lab; they could see their 3-inch square image in 60 seconds. Still, the trade-off was the print quality was lower than photos taken with 35mm negative film (and Polaroids deteriorated more quickly).
While the Polaroid was not intended for professional photography, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Tom Bianchi, and others proved the instant camera prints could have artistic merit.
The company later cultivated relationships with artists, even creating in 1978 a giant 20 x 24 inch camera for fine arts photographers.
In the 1980s, Polaroid’s popularity began to wane. Japanese companies — Sony, Canon, Olympus, and Minolta — began to take over the photo camera market, becoming associated with high quality. American companies could not keep up with the competition, and Polaroid was no different. Furthermore, labs and drug stores started to offer one-hour photo processing for 35mm and smaller cartridge formats in the 1980s. The instant camera began to lose its appeal when a photographer could get photo prints of better quality in an hour.
Polaroid has not been able to shake the problems that troubled the company since the 1980s. The brand survived a 2001 corporate bankruptcy. Everyone I know who shoots analog prefers to use 35mm point-and-shoots instead of Polaroid cameras because rolls of 35mm are still cheaper than Polaroid packs. It’s $32 for a double pack of Polaroid film; 8 exposures in one pack, compared to 24 or 36 exposures in a roll of 35mm film. Photographers invested in making non-digital images are willing to wait for better quality prints.
Even though the future of the company has seemed uncertain for forty years, with hindsight the actual history of Polaroid is clear. The History of Polaroid as a document is now made compelling as an inside look at Polaroid’s “industrial vision” in its peak years.
Further Reading
Polaroid Now: The History and Future of Polaroid Photography, ed. Steve Crist and Gloria Fowler (Chronicle Chroma, 2021).
The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, ed. William A. Ewing and Barbara P. Hitchcock (University of California Press, 2017).
Baker Library, Harvard School of Business, exhibition catalog for At the Intersection of Science and Art – Edwin H. Land & the Polaroid Corporation: The Formative Years (Harvard College, 2016).
Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).
Mark Olshaker, The Polaroid Story : Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience (Stein and Day, 1978).
Bio
Patrick Ellis is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa. He has interests in the history of film and media, and their interactions with the histories of cartography, medicine, science, and technology. Ellis is the author of Aeroscopics: Media of the Bird’s-Eye View (University of California Press, 2021) and has otherwise published in, e.g., Early Popular Visual Culture, Film History, Imago Mundi, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Ellis also does curatorial work and has programmed screenings or exhibits for the Center for Puppetry Arts (Atlanta), the Media Archaeology Lab (Boulder), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), and the Wolfsonian Museum (Miami), among others.