All its users had to do was press the shutter button, remove the negative from the back, wait for one minute, tear off a strip of protective paper and, hey presto, a fully formed photograph was revealed. Known as a Land Camera, it brought the same revolutionary processes its inventor had exhibited a year earlier into the hands of the everyday consumer. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary-godhead-inventor-genius."īy 1948, Polaroid had released the Model 95. Both fetishised superior, elegant, covetable product design. "Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent (Polaroid was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it drew from Harvard and MIT Apple has Stanford and Berkeley nearby). "Both companies specialised in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies," Bonanos writes. More than that, his company's early triumphs provided a road map for innovators right up to the present day - most notably the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. , explains, if the instant camera changed the way we think about photography forever, Land altered our relationship with technology in much the same way. Inspired by a simple question from Land's three-year-old daughter as to why she couldn't immediately view a set of pictures he had taken of her with his Rolleiflex while out for a family walk, it took years to realise and was the perfect embodiment of his maxim: "Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." But it was by far its most enduring and most profitable. His company had already experimented with polarising filters to reduce the effects of car headlight glare and produced goggles for fighter pilots serving in the Second World War. The instant camera that Land, a Harvard dropout, had shown to the American Optical Society was not Polaroid's first innovation. The man's name was Edwin Land and his showpiece was the very first Polaroid image. By the following Monday it was picture of the week in The next morning a press photograph of the inventor, seated behind a table in a white shirt and striped tie, holding a picture of that very same scene ran alongside a glowing editorial in Once the clock had finished its countdown, he peeled one sheet away from the other and showed them a perfect sepia portrait of himself. He fired the shutter of an 8x10 camera, pulled out a sandwich of paper, ran it through a set of mechanical rollers, then set a timer. On February 21, 1947, a young man stood before a room and unveiled a brand new creation. Sixty-five years ago Edwin Land launched the Polaroid camera, changing the way we think of both photography and technology forever.
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