15-05-2025
- Automotive
- Wall Street Journal
‘Mr. Polaroid' Review: PBS's Picture of a Visionary
Edwin Land—forbidding, obsessive, brilliant and the subject of the 'American Experience' presentation 'Mr. Polaroid'—was an idol of Steve Jobs, according to Land biographer Ron Fierstein, because his technology company 'made products people didn't even know they wanted.' Some they needed and couldn't get: Polarized headlights, for instance, which would have used Land's innovative film, cut the glare of oncoming cars, saved lives and cost auto companies more than they wanted to spend. 'It was a great idea,' writer Christopher Bonanos says with a laugh, 'and still hasn't been worked out 80 years later.'
'Visionary' is a word that gets kicked around rather loosely, but watching Land demonstrate in a 50-year-old film clip how he thought cameras would progress—into a wallet-size toy people would use as casually as a pen or pencil—is to watch a man predicting the future. He thought that instant photography and the Polaroid camera, which first hit the market in 1948, would benefit mankind in exaggerated ways that have never quite played out. But Land was nothing if not a complicated man, whose intentions were both lofty and undermined, it is suggested strongly, by monomania.
