Thin Blue Line: Polaroid 600 Film

Sunday 23 December 2012

Polaroid 600 Film

Some history. On 21 February 1947, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid Corporation, demonstrated instant photography to the Optical Society of America. The first commercially-available instant camera, the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95, was in the shops before Christmas of the following year. The first films were sepia-tone; black-and-white Polaroid film was introduced in 1950, but colour film didn't appear until 1963.Since then, Polaroid has slowly honed its range of popular instant cameras. In 1977, the OneStep Land Camera was a huge hit, and for four years was the biggest-selling camera of any type in the world. Throughout the 1990s, Polaroid have made 600 series cameras which have varied in outward appearance very slightly, but have a similar basic design and always cost £25 from Argos, regardless of economic conditions. See also new Polaroid innovations below.Throughout its history, Polaroid has given resources to photographer-artists in exchange for feedback about its products. The first of these, landscape photographer Ansel Adams, was hired by Edwin Land as a consultant in 1948. In his autobiography, Adams recalled that Land was "convinced that images can be as effective as words, and that every person has a latent ability to make effective contact with another through visual statements" (1985: 297).