![]() ![]() Polaroid has continued to produce today thanks to the recent interest and passion for vintage items. In addition to the Polaroid, there are many types of instant cameras on the market today, such as the Fujifilm Instax series that is particularly appreciated by young people, with its captivating and colorful design. The company was purchased in 2008 by a Polish billionaire and then acquired in 2017 by The Impossible Project, which was then renamed Polaroid Originals and shortened to Polaroid in 2020. Edwin Land's dream, however, did not drastically end. The company now found itself in a very competitive market, and was then dealt another major blow by the advent of digital. In 2008, the company declared bankruptcy. The 1980s were characterized by the production of new models, but also by the flop of the Polavision instant home movie system, which turned out to be a financial disaster. Edwin Land decided to resign and left Polaroid in 1982. In those revolutionary years Kodak entered the market for the production of self-developing films, and the advent of the Kodak Instant gave way to a patent war from which Polaroid emerged victorious. Photo by Oxfordian Kissuth, License CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Kodak EK100 instant camera from around 1977, produced for the European market, similar in construction to the Kodak EK6. The enterprising Land did not rest on his laurels and in the early 1970s he created another model destined to become iconic: the Polaroid SX-70, a folding camera which, among other things, allowed you to take editable images with effects. Unique Polaroid Polacolor Type 108 print, the photographer's blindstamp in the margin, framed, circa 1979. Related: 6 Artists in Front of the Camera Andy Warhol, Farrah Fawcett, polaroid The king of Pop Art became a famous endorser of the Polaroid cameras, which he carried with him everywhere to immortalize celebrities, document his artwork and capture important moments. The Polaroid Swinger was launched in 1965 to be aimed at a younger target audience. It was during these years that Polaroid became an iconic brand, loved all over the world and appreciated especially by the likes of Andy Warhol. In the 1950s, millions of people had already started taking instant photos, but the real boom didn't come until the '60s. That was when the first color self-developing film was born: Polacolor. Land was on vacation with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico and at one point he decided to take a picture of his 3-year-old daughter. The little girl, with the typical candor that characterizes children, asked her father why she couldn't immediately see the photo taken. This request lit up the light bulb in the inventor's mind, and he set to work on the idea of an instant camera. After some research, the Polaroid 95 was born in 1948, also called the Land Camera, considered the first instant camera in history commercialized on a large scale. A legend destined to last over time was born. The extraordinary invention led to the immediate success of the Polaroid Corporation, whose products were sold quickly and were appreciated by both the general public and veteran photographers. The diffusion of instant cameras is attributed to Edwin Herbert Land, an American inventor with an enterprising and prolific spirit, second only to Thomas Edison for the number of patents filed and cited as a source of inspiration by the visionary Steve Jobs. Related: The Female Look: 11 Women Who Changed Photography These digital images aren't printed, hung or pasted in an album of memories. Polaroids, which achieved instant success when they came out on the market, have suffered a blow with the advent of the latest generation of smartphones. However, the passion for vintage that has raged in recent years has given rise to a glorious revival of these cameras. ![]() Nowadays millions of people own a smartphone capable of taking burst photos, which they can then edit and filter all in a few seconds. In this way you have infinite possibilities to capture moments, but have lost the intimate essence of the moment. The photos end up on the web and can be seen by an unlimited number of eyes, yet remain in a certain sense trapped in the internet. ![]() ![]() You look through the lens, press a button, hear the click, take out a small rectangle of film… and wait. And it is precisely in that short wait that part of the magic happens. The image you had in front of you materializes on the paper you're holding in your hand. In mere terms of time, between an image immortalized by a mobile phone and a photo taken with a Polaroid there is a gap of a few moments. But the difference between the two experiences is enormous. ![]()
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