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Edwin Land [1909–1991], founder of Polaroid https://t.co/AMa2Q8XVtv https://t.co/Mls4PTKfZh
Land defined greatness as giving “the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems.” https://t.co/7HrVzFqR5N https://t.co/epWZK2ziaw
a couple of cute pictures of Land and his daughter Jennifer around 1945, when he was prototyping his cameras https://t.co/4XcPue09H2
one of the ways you can think of the iPhone is as a fusion of the Sony Walkman (another product Steve Jobs admired) and the Polaroid camera. You can see the similarity in the ads, the focus on the simplicity and intuitiveness of the interface https://t.co/RigwqKbVDD
> In an interview with Life magazine in 1972, [...] Land explained that he had invented one-step instant photography during a family vacation in 1944, when his daughter Jennifer had asked why she couldn’t see the pictures she had just taken “now”. https://t.co/L42fmBtbmF https://t.co/5auo5zVf9B
Land hired photographer Ansel Adams as a consultant, and Adams suggested that Polaroid photographs be used to make and showcase top-tier art (here's a selfie Adams took with a Polaroid in the 1950s) https://t.co/0yov1tPvN6
There's a unique intimacy to Polaroid shots that doesn't quite get replicated by any other medium – these were all taken by Andy Warhol. He took tonnes of Polaroid photos and you can buy many of them for thousands of dollars each. https://t.co/I9jfGiwKHt https://t.co/7sYvcap5si
wow imagine your dickpic being worth $10,000 (presumably because it was shot by Andy Warhol, but still) https://t.co/49VVY4L4s4 https://t.co/6E9leyqHJo
something feels slightly surprising about how many celebrities warhol photographed (he also took more than a handful of pictures of men performing sex acts on each other, but I'll leave that to you to discover 😅) https://t.co/ViirEWdUZ1
there's still a community of people who love using Polaroids to this day. Here are some of the shots I like from /r/polaroid https://t.co/zuLYjpNZyJ https://t.co/pFk6kmP9Vp
Apparently there's a thing you can do called a double exposure where you can make stuff look like this https://t.co/04MIizfDhL
David Hockney does some interesting, trippy things with Polaroids. "a cubist perspective [...] adding time, texture, and a bewitching movement that can appear to undulate under your gaze." https://t.co/JJzdonhhnX https://t.co/UEKLS7t9Yr
Back to Land. Why did he step down? Googling around, I feel like he was fundamentally a scientist/inventor, and he had some distaste for the marketing side of business. The product became unsexy along the way; he wasn't willing or able to bring sexy back https://t.co/9NdKHLusVd https://t.co/AqsLfTTEsJ
"Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so." https://t.co/ZPsGNnts6e https://t.co/YiLuFZqBNv
Land would hire art-history majors and send them off to science classes https://t.co/mbuQ5CXmNT
more on the failure – they got $600m less in damages than expected from patent infringements I feel like startups are fun up until the point that legal battles become a dominant part of your life https://t.co/Q14Zd8MmWN https://t.co/MTFvLPfASO
What's interesting to me is that it seems like traditional film sales were slowing down *before* I remember digital cameras taking off? But I was like 10 years old, idk I wasn't really paying attention. Anybody remember what it was like...? Cameras in 2000 https://t.co/vO3dPYkU0F https://t.co/fuk1NzbL3H
It was 1944 and Edwin Land had a vision of: “a pocket device you use like a telephone to record images for you to remember that would be with you always”. An electronic device—with no film In this beautiful 1970 film we see him present his vision: https://t.co/zVurNBKgVK
