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In the years after World War II, Polaroid became chiefly associated with instant photography. Land, who had pioneered a process in which coloured dyes were able to be passed from a negative onto film inside a sealed unit, launched his first camera in 1948 and by the 1970s the brand was a household name. In fact, as the first and only brand within its category, the brand became the name of the end product itself. In other words, people didn’t say ‘a Polaroid photograph’ or even ‘a photograph’, they simply said ‘a Polaroid’.

Polaroid’s profile was enhanced further during the 1970s through the long-running advertising campaign for the company’s One Step camera, featuring actors James Garner and Mariette Hartley in romantic roles. Because of its instantaneous nature, with photos developed in your hand seconds after they were taken, the Polaroid identity became that of a fun, cool ‘live for the moment’ kind of brand.

The 1970s also saw Polaroid develop an almost cult status, with various high-profile figures becoming passionate fans of the brand. The art world, in particular, became a fan of instant photography. This was no accident. Edwin Land had understood that artists could help to legitimize his invention since the 1950s. He had known that if Polaroid was seen as a novelty, or a gimmick, the brand would die as quickly as it had emerged. He therefore needed to establish Polaroid photography as a potential art form in its own right.

In 1955 he had found the solution in the form of Ansel Adams, an internationally acclaimed landscape photographer who had exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Adams was sent out to Yosemite National Park in California to experiment with different types of Polaroid film. Artistic photographs of snow-covered landscapes which rivalled much of Adams former work were the end result. With the help of a ‘serious’ photographer such as Adams, Polaroid was now a brand to be treated with respect. Such was this success that every time Land created a new film he would invite photographers and artists to the Polaroid labs to see what they thought. There is even an official Polaroid Collection of Art which has been lovingly built up and now includes over 20,000 works.

By the mid-1970s, modern artists of a very different nature to Ansel Adams became Polaroid devotees. Such luminaries as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, William Wegman, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras and Marie Cosindas were all big fans. Warhol, in particular, loved his Polaroid camera. He had it with him at all times and snapped everyone he met on his hedonistic adventures around Manhattan.

In an article which appeared in the Guardian in October 2001, Jonathan Jones explained the connection between the Polaroid brand and the art world:

Polaroid colour is intense, slightly unreal, adding its own sheen to an image. This appealed to artists because it made explicit the artifice of the photographic [...] The revolution that made Polaroid a universal tool for artists, as well as a truly mass photographic method, was the launch of its SX-70 camera in 1972. This was the first camera to have an integral Polaroid film, so you took the picture and saw it come out of the camera in an instant.

Since the company became a household name in the early 1970s, Polaroid had been used by artists to make dirty, cheap, quick, casual pictures whose contribution to the good name of Polaroid is debatable [...] The 1970s were the golden age of the Polaroid, but not in a way that lived up to Land’s artistic ideals.

In other words, the endorsement of artists and photographers which Land had so craved was now having a counterproductive impact on a brand seeking to establish instant photography as a serious medium. So while Polaroid’s popularity continued to rise, in many ways its credibility started to diminish.

With Polaroid viewed as a fun, frivolous and even throwaway brand, consumers rarely considered a Polaroid as a substitute for a ‘normal’ camera. These cameras were usually seen as a luxurious and optional product, which