A young Edwin Land demonstrating one of the first Polaroid peels, AP photo, Irish Times.
I had never seen this photo before. It's not the way one peeled a photo from East to West, but rather from South to North. At least that's the way most of us did it, but this was a photo op and I have the feeling that Dr. Land was doing his best to cooperate on the spur of the moment for some welcome publicity.
Davin O'Dwer's article in the Irish Times is one of the best I've read in a long time. Please click on the link and see for yourself. I think Land's two sentences below, quoted from a 1975 Forbes magazine article, go a long way in explaining the profound impact Polaroid photography has had on the world.
“Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.”
Edwin Land > Steve Jobs
How many degrees of separation?
© Time, inc.
Christopher Bonanos has written an OpEd piece for The New York Times online. Chris is a senior editor at New York magazine and the author of a history of Polaroid for the Princeton Architectural Press to be published next year. (As a disclaimer I must add that he has interviewed me concerning my involvement with Polaroid from 1957-1983.)
His lead-in says it all:
"In the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
In 1977 Jobs and Apple came up with this corporate mark.
Land and Polaroid (and I) came up with these package designs eight years earlier from 1968-1970.
How many degrees of separation?
Designer and art director Alf Lenni of Copenhagen created this graphic showing how the Polaroid color stripes were morphed into the Apple logo. I'm grateful to him for pointing this out as it had never occurred to me that they would use the same percentages of process colors as Polaroid.
Alf wrote about this: "Here I've taken the exact colors from the Giambarba Polaroid logo, [and] made them run into the first "official" brand Apple logo."
© Alf Lenni
How many degrees of separation?
Precious few?
Posted by Paul & Fran Giambarba on October 09, 2011 at 05:00 PM in Land, Edwin > Jobs, Steve | Permalink | Comments (2)