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Polaroid has one of the world’s most iconic brands: The self-developing snapshots, with their classic white borders, are nearly as recognizable as the red Coca-Cola logo, the Campbell’s soup can or the Burberry plaid.
The company’s cameras delivered instant visual gratification long before digital cameras arrived on the scene, making them an early photographic sensation.
But Polaroid’s fortunes have waned. The company, which was founded in 1937, has declared bankruptcy twice and was sold to two different buyers. Its assets have long been dispersed, and its factories were shut down. Polaroid even announced in 2008 that it would stop making its instant film, prompting some enthusiasts to create their own Polaroid-compatible film packs.
Now a company called PLR IP Holdings has rights to the Polaroid brand and has said it will revive some iconic Polaroid cameras. The company recently introduced a new camera, the Polaroid PIC-300.
Last month, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MIT Museum announced that PLR Holdings has donated a massive collection from Polaroid’s archives.
The archive has some fascinating objects. There are boxes of rare Polarized glasses dating from the 1939 World’s Fair, original newsprint sketches by Polaroid founder Edwin Land, a historic bellows camera the size of a filing cabinet and the SX-70 cameras that defined the instant-photography era.
Overall, the collection has more than 1,800 boxes containing 10,000 items.
“For anyone interested in science, technology, art or consumer culture, this is an unprecedented opportunity to look at a series of products and watch their design unfold from every aspect,” says Deborah Douglas, curator of the collection at the MIT Museum.
Polaroid is unusual among American companies in that it has extensively documented its products and maintained archives of its work, says Douglas.
“This is one of the top five company collections out there, along with IBM, Bell Labs, DuPont and Boeing,” she says.
