Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2025
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PBS Wong About Polaroid
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On Monday night, May 19, PBS ran a program in their ‘The American Experience’ series about the Polaroid company and its founder Dr. Edwin Land. I am a photographic historian and have had a close relationship with Polaroid management and research people.
The program was filled with inaccuracies, some minor, some not so minor. Viewers who didn’t know better were given the impression that Polaroid and Dr. Land collaborated with the apartheid regime in South Africa. The truth is that Polaroid’s groundbreaking self-developing cameras were distributed worldwide, including in South Africa.
When Polaroid developed a system to produce instant ID cards, the system was quickly adopted by numerous companies and countries, not just South Africa. South Africa had nothing to do with its development. The system speeded up the production of passport photos as well as ID cards for a wide variety of purposes. That the South African government used the system to produce ID cards that Black South Africans were required to carry didn’t mean that Polaroid was responsible for apartheid, or encouraged it. If the Polaroid system hadn’t existed the South African government would have produced the ID cards anyway, using more traditional methods.
When Polaroid pulled out of South Africa in response to protests, South Africans who’d bought Polaroid cameras were left high and dry, with no access to film.
I knew a man named Katz who operated a large photographic distribution company in South Africa called Photo Cats. He and other independent photographic distributors had to obtain Polaroid film from secondary sources for their customers, making an expensive product even more expensive. And, in reality, Polaroid pulling out of South Africa had no effect on apartheid, which died for other reasons.
To its credit, the program did point out Dr. Land’s pioneering diversity program in hiring, emphasizing the hiring of talented women and people of Black and other ethnic backgrounds. Polaroid was diverse at a time when most US businesses weren’t.
A major omission in the PBS program was that Dr. Land’s support for photographic artists through Polaroid grants was not mentioned. Land provided serious photographers with cameras and film at no cost, allowing them to explore the capabilities of the products. Polaroid had a massive collection of photographs from photographers like Ansel Adams, who enjoyed working with Polaroid cameras and film.
Polaroid even developed a giant camera that produced very large instant prints. As I recall, this camera made prints measuring something like thirty by forty inches, but I’m not positive about the dimensions.
In my own case, Polaroid provided me with film from four by five inches to eight by ten inches, film holders for my big cameras, and processing devices so I could explore the capabilities of these products in my studio, which I’d built as a teaching studio. Polaroid wanted photographers to push the boundaries of their products and I wanted my students to learn the serious use of Polaroid products.
A division of Polaroid in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did innovative work in optics, designing advanced viewfinder and other optics for Polaroid cameras and devices. They also had an advanced testing lab for lenses and other optical devices. When I was Technical Editor for PhotoPRO magazine, we hired them to test lenses for us. We got some surprising results — some highly reputed lenses weren’t really very good optically. FYI, the Zeiss lenses for Hasselblad cameras were the best lenses they’d ever tested, testing very close to the theoretical maximum performance.
The program briefly covered Kodak’s venture into instant cameras and the lawsuit that resulted. But there was no mention of the Russian cameras that copied the early Polaroid cameras but used their own film, also made in Russia, or the Japanese instant Instax cameras made by Fuji, which are still in production today. Agfa also produced a system for photographic darkroom use to produce instant prints via dye diffusion similar to the Polaroid process. Kodak was far from alone in copying Polaroid.
After Land was foolishly forced out of the company he founded, Polaroid went through a series of poor management teams and floundered. I knew many of these people. They were out of their element in the photographic industry. The final nail in the coffin was digital photography, which undermined the advantage Polaroid had with instant imaging. The company went through bankruptcy, and all of the people I’d known there ended up retiring or moving on to other jobs. I last saw some of them in 2003.
PBS could have done a much better job in researching their program.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.
On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.
To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonyward.com/bob-shell-youve-been-lied-to/