Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos

Author:Christopher Bonanos [Bonanos, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Photography, Art, Non-Fiction, Business, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781616890858
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Published: 2012-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

LUI G

L H

T I T

M A

A N

T ED E VXI S

P I

R O

E N

S S I O N

107

Marie Cosindas, Ansel Adams,

and Bill McCune pose at a

Polaroid reception.

108

I N S T A N T

commercials starring Candice Bergen, who explained in fastidious detail

how to focus the camera. The great demonstrator was working by proxy

this time.

What really kept Polaroid going through the crisis was its old, known

technology. Land grudgingly let Bill McCune back into the SX-70 realm,

needing his quality-control expertise, and in doing so just may have

saved the whole thing. Pack-film cameras continued to sell—more than

four million per year in this era—and Polaroid added a couple of

inexpensive models at the bottom of that line to boost income.

McCune, the pragmatist, pushed for budget versions of SX-70, with

cheaper plastics and vinyl in place of the leather. Land set himself

to, among other things, improving the film chemistry and working

on the sonar autofocus system. It turned out to be a tense but effec-

tive collaboration. A project this size needed pragmatists who were

not averse to dreaming, and dreamers who could also get things done.

Land and McCune fought, but the push-pull of their relationship had

its benefits.

Slowly, with pressure from both sides, the ship righted itself, and

by 1975 it was picking up speed. The batteries finally worked. There were

enough cameras in stores. Within a couple of years, Polaroid reached $1

billion in annual sales. SX-70 was no Edsel: It was the Ford Mustang, a

product that changed the business. Even Andy Warhol gave up his Big

Shot for one, after a little prodding from Ted Voss’s marketing group.

The recovery came just in time, too. Since the late 1960s, Eastman

Kodak had been watching the goings-on in Cambridge with a sense that

they had missed out on something—that instant photography was not a

gimmick but a major part of the future of picture-taking. Had they given it

away by making all those negatives? Polaroid had begun to hear disturbing

rumbles about Kodak’s plans: a full-on push into the instant field.

There was another project going on at Kodak in 1975, too. An engineer

named Steven Sasson had worked it up as a curio, with little expectation

that it would ever be made public. It was a new camera, built around not

a sheet of film but an electronic sensor, one that recorded its image on

magnetic tape and displayed it on a TV screen. It was no pocket camera but

a desktop hulk that looked a little like a slide projector. When he presented

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