Monday 1 October 2012

Instant photography at the push of a button!

The Polaroid SX-70 was a technological breakthrough. It was launched in 1972 and allowed a photographer to take a photo and then instantly see what had been captured. It was famously used by Warhol and Hockney and still has its devotee's today. 

A new book by Christopher Bonanos, Instant: A cultural history of Polaroid, has just been published describing the story of Polaroid's instant cameras HERE.

The blurb from Amazon.com;

"Instant photography at the push of a button!" During the 1960s and '70s, Polaroid was the coolest technology company on earth. Like Apple, it was an innovation machine that cranked out one must-have product after another. Led by its own visionary genius founder, Edwin Land, Polaroid grew from a 1937 garage start-up into a billion-dollar pop-culture phenomenon. Instant tells the remarkable tale of Land's one-of-a-kind invention-from Polaroid's first instant camera to hit the market in 1948, to its meteoric rise in popularity and adoption by artists such as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close, to the company's dramatic decline into bankruptcy in the late '90s and its unlikely resurrection in the digital age. Instant is both an inspiring tale of American ingenuity and a cautionary business tale about the perils of companies that lose their creative edge.
 Although Polaroids later earned a reputation for being low-cost and disposable, as well as instant, Edwin Land had always made a concious effort to get photographers and artists to use his cameras. Below is a picture by the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams of Yosemite Falls & Flowers (1979). And yes that is a classic Polaroid - it is a 3 1/4"  x 3 1/4 " square. 



 WestLicht Collection (HERE)