Innovation/Imagination:
50 Years of Polaroid Photography

Now at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, The Polaroid Collection’s prized exhibit of fine art photography will be on display until October 22nd, 2006. The company's legacy of museum-quality Polaroid instant photographs captures the history and unlimited creative potential of photography as it continues to revolutionize the world around us.

Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography 1947-1997 showcases the works of more than 50 internationally famous artists including Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Judy Dater, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Hockney.

Patron favorites include computer generated, giant size Polaroid instant 20x24-inch color images from a 5-foot camera weighing 235 pounds. Very rare, only six Polaroid 20x24-inch cameras exist, delivering large format photos in just 70 seconds.

Polaroid 20x24 photographs are permanently displayed in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Polaroid's 20x24 cameras are available for rental at studios in New York City and San Francisco.

History aficionados will take note that in 1944 the idea of an instant photograph was born. Scientist Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid Corporation, and his young daughter were in New Mexico on vacation. Land photographed his daughter and she promptly asked him why she could not see the picture immediately. Being a man who loved a challenge, within one hour Land visualized the requirements for a camera and the chemistry of instant film. It would be another three years before the first instant sepia film was introduced to the world in Boston.

From the start, Polaroid Corporation hired artists to experiment with its new cameras and film. Land stated, “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic – to make available a new medium of expression to numerous individuals who have an artistic interest in the world around them. The process must be concealed from – nonexistent for the photographer who, by definition needs to think of the art in taking and not in making photographs.”

Talented artists working with Polaroid products have contributed photographs to The Polaroid Collections, now burgeoning with more than 20,000 fine art images. The current exhibit, Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography features selections from The Polaroid
Collections.

More information about the event can be found at
http://www.museum.cornell.edu