Instant Photography

Snapshot affair: the enduring power of the Polaroid

The Polaroid camera ought to be remembered as a powerful tool for photographic artists.

Long before the world was digital and we realised that it was made of bytes and pixels, there was instant still photography.
Polaroids were the creation of an American engineer called Edwin Land, who is said to have invented the process after his daughter asked him why she couldn't see the holiday snapshots they took together as soon as they took them. Plenty of fathers of course would like to make that kind of wish come true, but Land's daughter was lucky. Her dad wasn't just an indulgent parent, he was an engineer and inventor of genius — a 20th-Century Edison.
Land was said to wrap himself so intently in his work that his staff erected a barrier outside the front door of his office to prevent him from walking straight out into the traffic. The world still lives with his inventions — polarising lenses that eliminate glare and the high-flying cameras in U2 planes and satellites that gave the United States the edge in the Cold War.
His first instant camera had to be manufactured with extraordinary precision so that a system of tiny rollers squeezed the developing chemicals out of the thick padded film at just the right rate. The science and the manufacturing processes were complex, but the vision behind them was simple: Land wanted to give families photographs that developed in their hands. He had an artistic vision too, based on giant studio cameras he designed — behemoths the size of bedroom closets that produced large format (20 x 24 inch) prints.