Land defined greatness as giving “the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems.”
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
a couple of cute pictures of Land and his daughter Jennifer around 1945, when he was prototyping his cameras
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
> 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”.
ft.com/content/d76d5f…
ft.com/content/d76d5f…
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)
(here's a selfie Adams took with a Polaroid in the 1950s)
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.
artsy.net/collection/and…
artsy.net/collection/and…
wow imagine your dickpic being worth $10,000 (presumably because it was shot by Andy Warhol, but still)
artsy.net/artwork/andy-w…
artsy.net/artwork/andy-w…
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 😅)
(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 😅)
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
reddit.com/r/Polaroid/
reddit.com/r/Polaroid/
Apparently there's a thing you can do called a double exposure where you can make stuff look like this
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."
theweek.com/captured/70864…
"a cubist perspective [...] adding time, texture, and a bewitching movement that can appear to undulate under your gaze."
theweek.com/captured/70864…
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
nytimes.com/1982/07/28/bus…
nytimes.com/1982/07/28/bus…
"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." nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opi…
Land would hire art-history majors and send them off to science classes
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
nytimes.com/1990/10/16/bus…
I feel like startups are fun up until the point that legal battles become a dominant part of your life
nytimes.com/1990/10/16/bus…
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 wsj.com/articles/SB980…
