Florian Kaps

Instant gratification

Florian Kaps celebrates the unique magic of instant photography, which transformed the worlds of science and art, as well as our sex lives

Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with his daughter in Santa Fe in 1943. ‘Why can’t I see the pictures now?’ she asked her father on the way home. But the photographic systems available at that time were really just ‘experimental portable darkrooms’ rather than truly ‘instant cameras’.

Only a few hours after his daughter’s question, Land got hold of a patent lawyer and by Christmas the first test versions of ‘Polaroids’ had been developed in the lab.

Land was an incredible visionary. He was not just researching an innovative film system. He was on the hunt for a completely new tool for life. The best comparison is with Steve Jobs, who often mentioned Land as one of his most important role models.

In 1948 Polaroid introduced the first one-step-photography instant camera. It was big and heavy, weighing over 45 pounds, and not exactly a bargain at $89.75 (around $800 today). But within a few hours all 56 available cameras and all the available films had been sold. Over the next five years 900,000 more cameras flew off the shelves.

There was one essential aspect of this new kind of photography that Land had probably not taken into account: private erotic pictures. Before 1948 the privacy and intimacy of picture-taking was strictly limited to individuals who owned a fully equipped darkroom. Everybody else had to accept the disturbing fact that their images were shared with strangers the moment they dropped their films at the counter.

Suddenly all of this was gone and for the very first time in the history of photography people could capture the tension and fragile beauty of sexual moments without leaving the room. It is not an overstatement to compare the sexual impact of instant photography to the invention of the pill in 1960.

The magic of Polaroids is their uniqueness.

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