Polaroid\'s Instant Karma

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The road to instant imagery began with a question familiar to any parent on vacation: Are we there yet?

It has been said that Edwin Land put his mind to inventing the Polaroid camera and film when his 3-year-old daughter asked why she had to wait to see her picture. In “Instant: The Story of Polaroid,” Christopher Bonanos crisply lays out how that deceptively simple question set the obsessive and brilliant Mr. Land on a tireless venture to conquer everything that prevented his impatient child from being able to “see it now.”

In the digital era - where one might visit the Grand Canyon and spend more time hunched over a camera or phone than beholding the miraculous vista - the ease with which we take and share images belies the complicated mechanisms that underpin all that data flying around. Capturing light and converting it into ones and zeroes was a transformative leap, but so was the very idea of instantaneous photography pioneered by Mr. Land, who almost single-handedly brought us here.

Mr. Land had been working on polarized lenses for car headlights when he turned his attention, which never took a vacation, to his daughter's question, at least according to the “apocryphal true story” of the camera's invention. His patent lawyer, coincidentally, was vacationing nearby, and they got together.

Theodore Voss, courtesy Princeton Architectural Press Marie Cosindas, Ansel Adams and Bill McCune at a Polaroid reception.

“He once said, when he had originally conceived the camera with his daughter in 1943, that he had worked out the system in a few hours,” said Mr. Bonanos, an editor at New York Magazine. “Except for those p roblems that took from 1943 to 1972 to solve.”

With Mr. Land's ability to “invent on demand,” it is striking just how much his company's successes, innovations and improvements were propelled by one overactive, serious mind. (Although there were many very, very smart people working with him.) But the story resembles that of another technological titan whose fortunes were housed in the mind of a single determined iconoclast. Drawing parallels to Apple is difficult to avoid, and Mr. Bonanos points out that Steve Jobs is said to have modeled his company after Polaroid. (For a truly eerie moment of prescience, view the trailer for Mr. Bonanos's book, below. In particular, watch Mr. Land beginning at the 1-minute-37-second mark.)

For folks of a certain generation, it is worth noting how much attention was paid to the quali ty of the product: its film, pictures, compactness and efficiency. Many people who came of age after Polaroid's heyday may consider Polaroid a novelty product - many young Instagrammers' familiarity with instant film began and ended with the cheaper plastic products that made fun but mediocre images. The apparent cheapness of those later products, after Mr. Land departed the company, obscures how technically advanced and intricate the earlier models were.

From the first Polaroid Land Camera of 1947 to the SX-70, introduced in 1972, his most refined product, Mr. Land was constantly fine-tuning his instant camera, “obsessed with keeping the quality high.” Mr. Bonanos said that for a while Mr. Land was going to call it the Penultimate, because there was always going to be another. Mr. Land retained Ansel Adams as a consultant early on, and Mr. Adams stayed for years and was very active in his consultancy. Unlike the later, plastic, cheaper Polaroids, the SX-70 was a f ine instrument in sleek silver and brown that serious image-makers took seriously.

Danny Kim, courtesy Princeton Architectural Press The final design of the SX-70 folded down to the size of a cigar case and could fit in a large coat pocket.

The misfortunes that seed the story of Polaroid's decline are familiar as well - digital-everything swept aside analog-everything - although Mr. Bonanos gives a more complete and nuanced rendering of that narrative. An aging inventor, proud and obstinate, struggled to adapt his company to newer products that might dull the glory of his 30-year achievement, the SX-70. A patent lawsuit with Kodak pointed Mr. Land's gaze backward instead of forward as he spent years demonstrating before the judge how unique and excellent his product was. And mismanagement of his compa ny by his successors - one went to jail for fraud, for example - are some of the elements that sank a once-great company.

Yet Polaroid, and instant film, endures. It appeals to a generation of hipster millennials who evoke a nostalgia for things they weren't brought up using - vinyl records are another example - by eschewing the uniformity of digital picture-taking. Although Polaroid stopped production of film for its cameras in 2008, endeavors like the Impossible Project have sought to nurse the beloved product back into existence. It is not perfect; They had to essentially reinvent, from scratch, out of love, a billion-dollar invention.

One can imagine Mr. Land's horror of the unpredictability of Impossible's results - but it's not nothing. “I would guess, that [Edwin Land] would be tickled by the level of love and attention for the medium that the Impossible guys have laid on,” Mr. Bonanos said.

Decades before anyone could pronounce the word artisanal, Polaroids were already giving people something precious. “If you drop it in the street or accidentally bend it in your pocket, it's done,” Mr. Bonanos said. “Every one is unique.”

And as concrete as the hand that holds it:

“If you have a picture of somebody meaningful to you, whether that person is your grandmother or the president, and it was shot with a Polaroid camera in that place - first of all, the picture was there that day. The thing was in that room. And it was exposed with the light that physically bounced off that person - the very light that came off that person went through the lens and went down to that paper and touched it. And this is overstating the case slig htly, but you know that myth of aboriginal peoples who say the camera takes a little piece of your soul? In a way, it sort of manifests itself that way, because the light is a trapped in the film. And in a way, if you're holding that picture you're holding a piece of that person.”

Jamie Livingston, courtesy Princeton University Press Part of Jamie Livingston's self-portrait project - one Polaroid picture each day - that ran for 6,000 days until he died in October 1997. March 30, 1997.

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