I shot PR and product photography for the Polaroid Corporation in the 1990′s. You can see some of them by following the “Polaroid” tag. Here’s a shot from 1995 of the lab that created the Polaroid Sprintscan:
For those nostalgic former Polaroid employees lurking, I dug up some photos (circa 1986) of a plant tour I took of the camera manufacturing plant in Norwood. These are mostly people testing the production cameras:
I should have scanned them on my Polaroid scanner, but that would have meant digging up a computer with a SCSI interface, and that’s another story . . .
I uploaded photos of the Polaroid Waltham film plant earlier.
By now you’ve probably all seen photos taken by the 20 by 24″ Polaroid camera. You might also have gotten close enough to an original to see the unbelievable detail that they display. Below is my portrait of a young John Reuter, director and “Keeper of the 20×24 Flame.”
But here are some shots you’ve probably never seen. An ad that features a bald guy and a gorgeous model’s photo. This was 1980, well before bald was popular. Polaroid was the first to to use sexy bald men as a device to attract viewers:
This guy’s modeling career took off after this.
Here’s another unique shot. It was done in Maine on an outing to photograph for Bill Wegman and his dog, Man Ray.
In any event, we wish John Reuter and his crew best of luck with the new 20×24 Studios. You can read all about them here.
Polaroid built a 40″ x 80″ “instant” camera which was basically a room with a hole in it for a lens and a large vacuum easel, inside the room, on the other side of the lens.
There was one built in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Others were built around the world, on the fly, with the “room” usually created out of rolls of black vinyl supported by scaffolding.
The photos here were shot by me in Boston’s MFA.
This photo shows the process of focusing the lens. Ideally the room
would be dark and the light hitting the subject being photographed would be projected onto this film plane.
One operator, outside the room, would focus the lens by listening to the shouts of the operator inside the lens looking through the loupe.
On the top you see the brown film negative that will be pulled down the vacuum frame to the floor prior to the exposure. The white paper is used as a spacer to verify focus around the image area.
When it’s time for the exposure, both operators are inside the camera, in the dark, wearing infrared goggles. You see the infrared light source on the extreme right of the frame in the yellow lamps. The operators pull the negative down to the floor.
They expose the film, then create a sandwich of the negative, the white roll of positive “sheet” material at the bottom and the “pod” developing chemicals.
The sandwich then goes through the stainless steel rollers, seen below the frame, at the bottom.
The sandwich was then suspended inside the camera as shown above. The film was developed for about two minutes and then peeled apart.
Below you see the sandwich being peeled outside the “camera,” under the lens.
Here we have a 1:1 shot of Monet’s “Water Lilies I, 1905″ with as much detail and texture as the original. In the mid 1980′s it was offered for sale by Polaroid, framed, for $ 935.