Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Charles Lane wrote about Sandra Day O’Connor, the rancher’s daughter who went on to become the most powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Today, Mark Gimein writes about Edwin Land, the man who put a darkroom in your pocket.
—The Editors
As he reached the end of his career, Walker Evans, arguably the greatest American photographer, finally turned to a color camera: the Polaroid SX-70. Andy Warhol favored the simpler Polaroid Big Shot. Ansel Adams and Chuck Close used specially made giant Polaroids.
None of this was by accident. Edwin Land, the founder and driving force behind Polaroid, made sure to get his cameras into the hands of just about every notable American photographer. It was great advertising, the predecessor to everything from Absolut’s collaborations with artists to Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” ads. But it was something else, too. For the polymathic Land, art, science, and engineering all fit together naturally. He appreciated the work of artists and as he did that of scientists. Both, in his mind, pushed boundaries and did it for love of the enterprise. And he loved what artists did with his inventions. Nothing defined the look of the 1970s and 1980s quite like a Polaroid snapshot.
