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Oct. 5 2012 11:07 PM

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The Rise and Fall of Polaroid

Polaroid was once the Apple Computer of the mid-20th century.

In the middle of the last century, Polaroid was the coolest technology company on earth. Founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 1937, Polaroid created a field—instant photography—all its own, and completely owned it for decades. Under its visionary founder-scientist, Edwin Herbert Land, Polaroid grew from wonky startup to high-tech path-breaker to familiar piece of Americana—inspiring a young Land acolyte, Steve Jobs, along the way. In the digital era, all photography is instant photography. Yet there remains something magical about a physical print that develops in your hand. Chris Bonanos explored this modern affection for an obsolete medium in his book Instant: The Story of Polaroid, from which this slideshow is drawn.

The story of Polaroid is inextricably bound up with that of Edwin Land. The inventor of instant photography and, broadly, almost everything else that Polaroid made, Land was an outsize, perfectionist presence, both setting Polaroid’s philosophical direction and actually getting his hands dirty at the lab bench.
Steve Jobs explicitly said that he founded Apple on the Polaroid model. Land understood that an enthusiastic demonstration of a new tech product is the best tool in the world for showing people that something they never knew they’d wanted was something they had to have. A generation later, Jobs did the same thing in turtleneck and jeans.

Matt Buchanan.
Polaroid, both the word and the corporation, began in a field that had little to do with photography. Land was a Harvard dropout who founded a company to commercialize his first invention, the sheet polarizer—a filter that, used in pairs, could control light like a finely tuned valve. Early applications included sunglasses, an experimental system to eliminate headlight glare, and the very first 3-D movies, shown (using these glasses) at the Chrysler exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
The first Polaroid camera, the Model 95, went on sale in November 1948. A huge, heavy contraption, weighing more than 4 pounds, it produced small, sepia-toned photographs that had to be peeled off their backing after 60 seconds’ development. The first lot delivered to Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store sold out in a few hours, certifying Polaroid as a genuine craze.

Danny Kim.
True black-and-white film arrived in 1950; color, in 1963. But the real payoff came in 1972, with the system called SX-70. (That’s the one that makes the photos we all think of as “Polaroids,” with the white border and the wide tab at the bottom.) After nearly 30 years, Land’s vision was fully realized: point-shoot-see, with no timing, no peeling, no impediments. The system’s development costs were staggering: One employee says it reached $2 billion, and those are 1970s dollars.

Danny Kim.
Fine artists, from Ansel Adams to Walker Evans to William Wegman, embraced Polaroid. In 1976, to show off the capabilities of his film, Land ordered construction of a camera capable of making Polaroid photos that were 20 inches wide by 24 inches high. Fewer than a dozen of these behemoths were built; five still exist. Andy Warhol (another big Polaroid fan) tried it out with dramatic results, posing for this double portrait by Bill Ray in 1980.

Bill Ray.
Land’s only real misstep came in 1977, with a system called Polavision that made instant 8-millimeter movies. Clobbered in the marketplace by Sony’s new Betamax videotape, it made Land, for the first time, look out of step. His board began to hint that he should retire, and in 1982 he did. (He died in 1991.) In the years that followed, Polaroid—dependent on its income from film sales—doubled down on analog instead of embracing digital photography, and piled up debt.

Ted Voss.
After faltering through the 1990s, Polaroid declared bankruptcy in October 2001. It was sold, and sold again; one of those new owners turned out to be running a Ponzi scheme and got 50 years in federal prison. Since a second bankruptcy in 2009, it’s been jointly owned by two investment firms, Hilco and Gordon Brothers, who license the brand name for use on a variety of cameras and electronics. Meanwhile, the analog flag has been picked up by a small company called the Impossible Project, which bought Polaroid’s last film factory and has spent the last three years getting it going again. Impossible’s film (this photo is an example) doesn’t quite have the effortless ease of use that Polaroid’s did, but Polaroid enthusiasts—of which there remain many—embraced it instantly.

Christopher Bonanos.

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