Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
+ $3.99 shipping
86% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Instant: The Story of Polaroid Hardcover – September 26, 2012
| Christopher Bonanos (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
Enhance your purchase
- Print length192 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton Architectural Press
- Publication dateSeptember 26, 2012
- Dimensions6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101616890851
- ISBN-13978-1616890858
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

- +
- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
From the Author
Instant is a business story, about what happens when a company loses its innovative spark. It is a fine-arts story, showcasing the amazing things photographers (from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol to Chuck Close) did with Polaroid film. It is a technology story, of a company that created and maintained a niche all its own for 60 years. And it is a pop-culture history, of a friendly product that millions of people absolutely adored. I like to think that it also tells a larger story, about the rise and fall of American invention and manufacturing.
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
"When I was little, long before personal computers, let alone Instagram-enabled digital camera-phones, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. By far the most uncanny, sexy, insanely great piece of technological magic in our household was my parents' Polaroid. Instant, Chris Bonanos' smart, thoughtful, charming chronicle of that iconic invention and its remarkable inventor, is a delight." --Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers andHeyday, host of public radio's Studio 360
About the Author
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton Architectural Press; Illustrated edition (September 26, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1616890851
- ISBN-13 : 978-1616890858
- Item Weight : 1.39 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #720,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #230 in Business Infrastructure
- #284 in Popular Culture Antiques & Collectibles (Books)
- #1,466 in Photography History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on August 26, 2015
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Bonanos begins with Polaroid's birth in 1932 as a partnership between George W. Wainwright III and Edwin Land, who had patented the world's first polarizer in 1929. The company was a manufacturer and supplier of sheet polarizers, and Edwin Land's values were in evidence everywhere –the product's presentation, company communication, every word chosen for its annual report. In 1937, the company was reincorporated as Polaroid Corporation and parted ways with Wheelwright. The book's second chapter talks about Land's unorthodox hiring practices and its success in 3D glasses and sunglasses, followed by a boon from military contracts during World War II.
The first Polaroid camera, an 8x10 view camera, made its debut in 1947. In 1948, the Model 95, weighing 4 pounds, appeared on the shelves of a Boston department store and sold out in one day. It used a peel-apart orthochromatic sepia film and was Polaroid's first big success with consumers. A black-and-white Type 41 film was introduced in 1950. It needed a print-coater to prevent the image from fading, as did every Polaroid film until 1970. That's why people "shake it like a Polaroid picture." People waved the photos around to get the print-coater to dry faster. Chapter 4 takes us through Polaroid's hey day in the 1950s and 1960, which saw the company produce a string of innovative consumer cameras and films. There is discussion of research and development, advertising, and the design team that made Polaroid cameras desirable and memorable.
Chapter 5 covers the creation of Polaroid's first integral film in 1972: SX-70, know for its ability to manipulate the image until it was discontinued in the 2000s, and the fantastic Land Camera that would use that film. Polaroid's first failure is discussed in Chapter 6. That was Polavision in 1977, an instant movie film. The problem was that it was behind the times. Video tape had recently been invented and would soon take the market for home movies. Chapter 7 covers the decades-long legal battle with Kodak over its instant film that allegedly infringed twelve of Polaroid's patents. On the other hand, Polaroid struck a deal with Fuji that allowed that company to produce instant film for the Japanese market.
The Fall: The changes in management, in product philosophy, discontinuation of a lot of R&D, catastrophic decisions to abandon digital technologies, especially printing, and the mounting debt from resisting a hostile takeover in the 1980s and 1990s are cataloged in Chapter 8. Polaroid had a string of presidents who made bad decisions and lacked an overarching vision for the company. The downward spiral continues in Chapter 9 with the controversial sale of the company to Bank One, who might have fixed the price. In the end, Polaroid was the victim of fraud for which Tom Petters went to prison, an ignominious end for perhaps the most innovative company ever. There are other books about Edwin Land and Polaroid, but "Instant" is a concise, readable, and informative overview.
This book chronicles the history of Polaroid, which is inseparable from the life of its exceptional founder, CEO, and technological visionary, Edwin Land. Land, like other, more recent founders of technological empires, was a college drop-out (the tedium simply repelled him), whose instinct drove him to create products which other, more sensible, people considered impossible, for markets which did not exist, fulfilling needs which future customers did not remotely perceive they had, and then continuing to dazzle them with ever more amazing achievements. Polaroid in its heyday was the descendant of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park invention factory and the ancestor of Apple under Steve Jobs—a place where crazy, world-transforming ideas bubbled up and were groomed into products with a huge profit margin.
Although his technical knowledge was both broad and deep, and he spent most of his life in the laboratory or supervising research and product development, Edwin Land was anything but a nerd: he was deeply versed in the fine arts and literature, and assembled a large collection of photography (both instant and conventional) along with his 535 patents. He cultivated relationships with artists ranging from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol and involved them in the design and evolution of Polaroid's products. Land considered basic research part of Polaroid's mission, and viewed his work on human colour perception as his most important achievement: he told a reporter in 1959, “Photography…that is something I do for a living.”
Although Polaroid produced a wide (indeed, almost bewildering) variety of cameras and film which progressed from peel-off monochrome to professional large-format positive/negative sheets to colour to all-in-one colour film packs for the SX-70 and its successors, which miraculously developed in broad daylight after being spit out by the camera, it remained, to a large extent, a one product company—entirely identified with instant photography. And, it was not only a one product company (something with which this scrivener has some acquaintance), but a one genius company, where the entire technical direction and product strategy resided in the braincase of a single individual. This has its risks, and when the stock was flying high there was no shortage of sceptical analysts on Wall Street who pointed them out.
And then slowly, painfully, it all fell back to Earth. In 1977, Land's long-time dream of instant motion pictures was launched on the market as Polavision. The company had expended years and on the order of half a billion dollars in developing a system which produced three minute silent movies which were grainy and murky. This was launched just at the time video cassette recorders were coming onto the market, which could record and replay full television programs with sound, using inexpensive tapes which could be re-recorded. Polavision sales were dismal, and the product was discontinued two years later. In 1976, Kodak launched their own instant camera line, which cut into Polaroid's sales and set off a patent litigation battle which would last more than fourteen years and cause Polaroid to focus on the past and defending its market share rather than innovation.
Now that everybody has instant photography in the form of digital cameras and mobile telephones, all without the need of miracle chemistry, breakthrough optics, or costly film packs, you might conclude that Polaroid, like Kodak, was done in by digital. The reality is somewhat more complicated. What undermined Polaroid's business model was not digital photography, which emerged only after the company was already steep in decline, but the advent of the one hour minilab and inexpensive, highly automated, and small point-and-shoot 35 mm cameras. When the choice was between waiting a week or so for your pictures or seeing them right away, Polaroid had an edge, but when you could shoot a roll of film, drop it at the minilab in the mall when you went to do your shopping, and pick up the prints before you went home, the distinction wasn't so great. Further, the quality of prints from 35 mm film on photographic paper was dramatically better; the prints were larger; and you could order additional copies or enlargements from the negatives. Large, heavy, and clunky cameras that only took 10 pictures from an expensive film pack began to look decreasingly attractive compared to pocketable 35 mm cameras that, at least for the snapshot market, nailed focus and exposure almost every time you pushed the button.
The story of Polaroid is also one of how a company can be trapped by its business model. Polaroid's laboratories produced one of the first prototypes of a digital camera. But management wasn't interested because everybody knew that revenue came from selling film, not cameras, and a digital camera didn't use film. At the same time, Polaroid was working on a pioneering inkjet photo printer, which management disdained because it didn't produce output they considered of photographic quality. Imagine how things might have been different had somebody said, “Look, it's not as good as a photographic print—yet—but it's good enough for most of our snapshot customers, and we can replace our film revenue with sales of ink and branded paper.” But nobody said that. The Polaroid microelectronics laboratory was closed in 1993, with the assets sold to MIT and the inkjet project was terminated—those working on it went off to found the premier large-format inkjet company.
In addition to the meticulously documented history, there is a tremendous amount of wisdom regarding how companies and technologies succeed and fail. In addition, this is a gorgeous book, with numerous colour illustrations (expandable and scrollable in the Kindle edition).
My biggest disappointment is this: the photos of Polaroid products and their packaging--or rather, the lack thereof.
The author tells us how important the design aesthetic was at Polaroid but includes only about SEVEN pics of cameras out of the entire line of products & packaging! Products are mentioned, but never shown, such as the large format cameras, we get one head-on view of the Polavision movie camera, no shots of the later models or the brightly colored packaging that was their signature. (I guess I'll have to pick up Paul Giambarba's "The Branding of Polaroid" for that). The majority of photos are samples of the artistic use of Polaroids (nice, but a bit repetitive) and too many shots of celebrities (few of which were of any interest to me). I would rather have seen more pics of the great minds behind Polaroid's innovations--especially since in terms of their hiring practices, they were ahead of their time, and many of those scientific minds belonged to women. Lets' see who these people were! I found myself constantly turning to the internet (and the author's blog) to find photos & more info about the the subjects in the book.
This book is good enough for the publisher to revisit the layout: considering the careful thought that went in to the dust jacket, colors, etc. of this hardcover edition, I would love to see them print a larger softback edition with more photos of the items & people which are actually the subject matter of the text--I think they'd have a real winner on their hands.
Top reviews from other countries
I confess a Polaroid passion having taken first prize in the magazine Photo Technique way way back and receiving a SX70 Alpha and kit as a prize.. a very soft spot remains for the design and the images I achieved. Now I use the zink for prints - and the grandchildren love them.
If you are interested in Polaroids then this is a must read.









