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by doctorpangloss 1018 days ago
> the foldable sx70 is just too nice. who wants to carry around a brick?

Edwin Land was the Steve Jobs of that era, the SX70 was the iPod of that era. His Wikipedia page: a pathetic 3,000 words. Dieter Rams (another Jobsian figure) doesn't figure much better, but nothing he ever designed was as big as the SX70, as brilliant as he was. And Land was actual scientist, he made meaningful technologies for WW2, he's practically a war hero, and yet, who the fuck knows who he is outside of Walter Isaacson readers?

Polaroid.com picked some cool photographers. It feels like social media adjacent stuff without being so low brow. I'm surprised they didn't do Elsa Dorfman. They are missing a lot of opportunities with the heritage. Of course they didn't show me a Andy Warhol, but then again, they probably don't have the rights to do that.

If you're going to be a heritage brand, you ought to think how to equip the greats, the Weegees and the Diane Arbuses, who could surely make interesting stuff with a Polaroid. But if they lived today, they'd use a D700 and an ultrawide, a DSLR composes a lot better than an LCD screen or an EVF and sensor technology has practically peaked in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RyiS-mrp1c). The real problem is that Apple is so painfully apolitical, social media photography on iPhones is the layperson equivalent of crapstraction, so they'll never deliver something advertises that it's for "getting the shot," they'll stick to advertising that it's for "getting the shot [of the totally uncontroversial everyman thing that is personally interesting / sentimental only to you]." You know, something consumerist and literally disposable, like a polaroid.

2 comments

I highly recommend Edwin Land's biography, The Instant Image. The title refers not to the method of photography but how the device was invented -- conceived as a complete product in one mental flash that took years of real scientific invention to bring to technical fruition.
> another Jobsian figure

This characterisation (tagging? clubbing?) comes across as an insult to those figures.