Innovation Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography

by Barbara Hitchcock

The works in Innovation/Imagination are all selected from the Polaroid Collection. Included here are more than 80 colorplates of Polaroids by such diverse artists as Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Nancy Burson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras, and William Wegman. Their photographs display the artistic inventiveness and technical achievement made possible by Polaroid film and present an overview of the past 50 years in photography.
The photographs are accompanied by an essay placing Polaroid in historical context, and comments by the photographers themselves offer insights into how Polaroid has affected their art. A chronology provides more information on important Polaroid achievements.

120 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1999

Reviews

[Orion · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book publishes the works of an exhibit held to celebrate the first 50 years of Polaroid photography. The works are from the Polaroid Collection that was started by Edwin Land to involve professional photographers in the development of his technology. Eventually this collaboration developed into a formal collection. This book gives us a wonderful glimpse of the great works that have been created using this medium. The photographs are arranged by decade which allows the reader to see the development in technique and technology. Each picture is accompanied by the name of the photographer, their country, the title of the work,the date, and the type of film used. The only thing I felt was missing was a some description of the works by either the photographers or the editors.