plastic card with a clear window in front. As the
image developed and stabilized, opacifiers protect-
ing the image became slowly transparent until the
finished print was revealed. The particular intrigue
of the SX-70—one which landed the SX-70 and its
inventor on the cover ofLifemagazine—was tak-
ing a picture and watching the image appear before
your very eyes. And because of this particularly
novel feature, the SX-70 also laid claim to a new
kind of photographic practice: the photograph that
was taken so that the photographer, and often the
subject as well, could watch it develop. In contrast
to the sophistication and control offered to the user
of the Land Camera, the SX-70 offered remarkable
ease of use, mechanical simplicity, and a certain
‘‘magical’’ quality. Of course, the ingenious design
of the SX-70 had its drawbacks as well. Land’s
democratic desire to create a camera for anyone
and everyone marked as problems many of the
design features that might have given more aesthe-
tically minded photographers more creative con-
trol. And while some art photographers have
found aesthetic uses for the SX-70 (see below), for
the most part, the technology defined and reflected
a distinctly vernacular usership.
While the Land Camera and the SX-70 stand out
as particular milestones, the technological history of
instant photography includes a broad range of pro-
ducts and applications. Since the introduction of the
SX-70, Polaroid has emphasized the shift in the
instant photography demographic from the profes-
sional photographer to the amateur snapshooter by
producing a variety of inexpensive cameras featuring
plastic lenses and novel features, like the stripped
down Pronto! (introduced in 1976), the brightly
colored Cool Cam (1988), and the I-Zone, still
being manufactured at the turn of the twenty-first
century, which produces postage-stamp-sized color
photos with a sticker backing. But Land also found
ways to employ his instant photographic process to
develop a variety of other technologies, from instant
slide films and instant overhead transparency films to
the ground-breaking but ill-fated Polavision, an
instant, color, motion picture system. And Polaroid
was by no means the only company to produce tech-
nology for instant photography, although most have
relied heavily on the SX-70 design. Minolta, Konica,
Keystone, and Fuji all designed instant cameras to be
compatible with Polaroid films. The Polaroid Cor-
poration put its proprietary relationship to instant
camera and film technology to the test in 1976 when
it filed suit against Eastman Kodak Company in a
landmark patent case and won. After ten long years
of litigation, Kodak, who had managed to corner
over a quarter of the U.S. market on instant photo-
graphic technology in the early 1970s with its Kodak
Instant system, was found to have infringed upon
seven of ten Polaroid patents covered in the suit
and ordered to stop manufacturing and selling their
instant cameras.
Since the 1980s, the Polaroid Corporation has
been in decline and the popularity of instant photo-
graphy is currently much challenged by the growing
sophistication of digital image technology. How-
ever, instant photography may yet maintain a foot-
hold in the photographic technology market for its
broad range of practical and aesthetic uses. Because
of its immediacy and the control it offers the photo-
grapher over the image, the instant photograph has
played a role in a variety of professional contexts
including medical imaging, document copying,
identification, insurance, and professional photo-
graphy. In addition, and in keeping with Land’s
goal of bridging the gap between art and vernacular
photography through instant technology, Polaroid
has actively and effectively encouraged instant
photography’s role in the realm of art production
and maintains a large archive of artwork produced
with their cameras. The success of this enterprise
reflects an aesthetic engagement with the particular
formal and technical character of the medium. The
quality of images produced with Land film, for
example, is superb, as the instant negative is neces-
sarily the same size as the positive print and there-
fore equivalent to standard medium and large
format films. While Ansel Adams pioneered the
use of Polaroid instant film for his highly detailed
landscapes, contemporary artists like Chuck Close
have maintained this practice, using 2024-inch
Polaroid prints as maquettes for his large photore-
alist portrait paintings. William Wegman has also
created a number of striking 2024-inch images of
his famous Weimaraner dogs.
Other artists have been drawn to the particular
visual effects of the amateur-oriented SX-70 films.
Andy Warhol liked to use the contrasty photos pro-
duced by his Polaroid Big Shot to create his commis-
sioned silkscreen portraits of the 1970s and 1980s,
and Walker Evans, a lifelong detractor of color
photography, became enamored with the vivid,
jewel-toned masterpieces he created with the SX-70
in the last years of his life. The unique design of
instant film also offers a wealth of technical possibi-
lities for aesthetic experimentation to those willing to
scratch, peel, and manipulate their instant images.
Instant photography manuals offer guidelines for
Polaroid photo transfers, negative separation, peel-
ing away the white titanium oxide backing to alter
the colors, and pressing into the developing emulsion
to distort the image. Using this latter technique,INSTANT PHOTOGRAPHY