Polaroid Corporation

» see polaroid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

polaroid's peak years overlap with my childhood, but not in a way that produced a memory. the cameras did sell in turkey through the 80s and into the 90s, and you would see a polaroid pop up at a wedding or a graduation, but they were the second camera in the bag behind a regular 35mm kodak. the photo lab on the corner of the neighborhood developed the 35mm in an hour and that was what most families used. polaroid was the novelty for the table, not the daily camera.

edwin land started the company in cambridge massachusetts in 1937, originally as a polarizing-filter shop selling to the military and to bausch and lomb. in 1944 his daughter asked why she could not see the photo right away after he took it on vacation, and he spent the next four years working out the chemistry of self-developing film. the land camera shipped in 1948. the sx-70 in 1972 was the design moment, with a folding body and a motor that pushed the print out the front of the camera before your eyes. by 1978 the company had 21,000 employees and was the second-largest photographic company in the world.

land left the company in 1980 and the polaroid that survived him spent the 80s suing kodak for patent infringement on instant film. kodak lost the case in 1986 and exited instant photography. the win cleared the category for polaroid right as digital cameras were starting to ship from sony and casio. the company spent the 90s missing the digital transition by underestimating how fast the cost of a ccd sensor would drop.

chapter 11 came on october 11 2001 with about 950 million dollars in debt. one equity partners, a unit of bank one, bought the assets out of bankruptcy in 2002 for around 255 million. the corporate shell that survived was renamed primary pdc and sat with the remaining liabilities. tom petters bought the operating company in 2005 for about 426 million. that turned out to be the worse of the two endings.

~ the record ~

~ the petters years ~

tom petters ran polaroid until december 2008, when federal agents raided his minneapolis offices in connection with a 3.65 billion dollar ponzi-scheme investigation that had nothing to do with cameras. ten months earlier, in february 2008, polaroid had stopped making integral film at its enschede netherlands factory and at the mexico facility. there was no replacement supplier. millions of working sx-70 and 600-series cameras suddenly had no film coming. petters was convicted on twenty counts of fraud in december 2009 and sentenced to fifty years.

~ what it became ~

a small group of former polaroid europe staff led by florian kaps bought the enschede factory in 2008 under the name the impossible project, and spent the next two years reverse-engineering an instant film that would work in the surviving polaroid cameras. the first impossible film shipped in 2010. it cost about three dollars a frame and the first batches were quiet, blurry, and slow to develop. polish investor wiaczesław smołokowski bought the polaroid brand in 2017 and merged it with the impossible project under polaroid originals, then renamed the whole thing back to polaroid in 2020. the cameras sold in retail stores in 2026 as polaroid go and polaroid now are made by that company, which is a different legal entity than the one edwin land founded.

~ what came after ~

the polaroid look outlived the company that made the cameras. the white-bordered square print is a filter on every phone photo app, and the outkast lyric kept the brand on car radios for years after the original corporation was dead. the andre 3000 line shipped in 2003, between the first bankruptcy and the second. for a category that was supposed to be a fad from 1948, the print survived everything that was supposed to replace it.

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