WE ARE ALL photographers now, creators of instantaneous nostalgia with our digital cameras and smartphones – maintaining a visual record of our lives has become second nature to most people. There was a time, of course, when the process of instant photography was synonymous with Polaroid, a brand and a technology that always managed to seem vaguely magical – capturing an image on to paper in mere moments.
The magic was all the work of Edwin Herbert Land, one of the most inspired, and inspiring, inventors of the 20th century. Born in Connecticut in 1909, Land had an early fascination with optics and enrolled in Harvard in 1927, studying chemistry, but after his first year he became a member of that vaunted club of inventors who dropped out of college – for the inspired few, it seems, the rigour of formal education doesn’t have much to offer.
He moved to New York where, the story goes, he was prompted to work on a light-polarising filter after being dazzled by the headlamps of oncoming cars. He determined that a series of minuscule crystals, set in a plastic layer, would adjust the angle of light passing through, separating the different rays and minimising specular reflection.
Not having the facilities to develop such a filter himself, he decided to sneak into a Columbia University lab that contained a large electromagnet by walking along a sixth-floor ledge and clambering through an open window – the effort was worth it, because the result was arguably his most enduring invention, the polarising lens, patented in 1929 (the same year in which he married his wife, Helen).
To commercialise the Polaroid lens, as he called it, he founded the Land-Wheelwright labs in 1932 with his Harvard physics professor, George Wheelwright III. Their first client was Kodak, founded by another visionary who popularised photography, George Eastman.
Kodak made a screw-on Polaroid filter mount, and the technology was quickly adapted for sunglasses and 3D film glasses – his work is still used in a whole range of products today.
The Polaroid filter was just the start of Land’s creative output – Land-Wheelwright became Polaroid in 1937, with its headquarters in Boston, and during the second World War, Land embarked on a series of innovations for military purposes. Chief among his developments in this era was the Vectograph process of 3D photography, used by the US airforce for aerial reconnaissance.
It was at this point that Land began to focus on instant photographic technology, and by early 1947 he had a working demonstration available, called the Land Camera, which went on sale before the end of 1948.
The concept of an instantly developing photograph was more than a mere gimmick – the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams was a particularly outspoken fan.
It was a genuine revolution in the history of photography, and Land continued to evolve the technology over the following 30 years, most notably with the classic SX-70, a folding, motorised camera that was released in 1972 and became an instant design classic.
It was with the Polaroid camera that Land proved he wasn't just a groundbreaking scientist, but also a natural showman – his presentations were legendary, and his public persona became almost as famous as the camera itself. In 1972, for instance, he was on the cover of both Timeand Newsweek, not bad for a college dropout.
But the rest of the decade saw Land make a huge investment of time and resources into developing an instant movie system, the Polavision. When introduced in 1977, it was an expensive commercial flop, and marked the beginning of the end of Land’s era at Polaroid. By 1980, he had been forced out of the company he founded and didn’t attend the firm’s 50th anniversary celebrations a few years later.
He spent the rest of his years working in a private lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appropriately enough the site of a former great inventor’s breakthrough – it was where Alexander Graham Bell sent the first transatlantic cable. Land died in 1991, aged 81.
With Kodak on its last legs – the firm filed for bankruptcy last week – and Polaroid searching for marketing gimmicks to keep its brand relevant, that pioneering era of early consumer photography seems like a pre-digital relic. But the huge success of smartphone apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic, which give pristine digital images the character of old film stock and Polaroids in particular, indicates that Land’s influence endures – in a very real way, his camera redefined what it meant to capture memories.
And Land himself knew exactly how groundbreaking his work really was – in an interview with Forbes in 1975, he said: “Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.”
PHOTOGRAPH: AP PHOTO
