Instant Artifact: ‘Edwin Land: A Scrapbook’

My book now has its own Facebook page. It’s not like a personal page but is instead in the format that Facebook uses for businesses, which means you can’t Friend the book; you can only Like it. Now’s your chance!

In order to entice you over there, I’ve shared a short film, which is not posted on YouTube and thus can’t be embedded here. It’s titled Edwin Land: A Scrapbook, and it’s an 11-minute tribute made for Dr. Land’s memorial service in 1991, principally by the longtime Polaroid employees Sam Yanes, Bill Warriner, and Bill Field. (The 20×24 Studio put it up on its own Facebook page awhile back.)

What I find most compelling about the film is that its narration is made up entirely of clips spoken by Land himself, which are not that easy to come by. Although there are plenty of recordings of him in existence, most of them are locked up in the Polaroid archives at Harvard Business School, and that portion of the collection is years (possibly decades) away from being sorted, catalogued, and accessible. So until it’s all digitized and streamed, probably somewhere late in the 22nd century, we Polaroid freaks have to content ourselves mostly with scattered copies that have remained in private hands, like this one.