Polaroid's pix to be auctioned in June 2010

A post titled Controversial Auction Sells Warhols From Polaroid’s Collection provides an interesting footnote to the demise of Polaroid. The main topic of the piece is the coming sale of Polaroid's corporate photo collection:

More than 1,200 works from Polaroid’s corporate collection, chronicling decades of artistic experimentation by Andy Warhol, Chuck Close and others who pushed the aesthetic boundaries of the instant-film process, will be hammered away by order of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Minnesota. Many non- Polaroid photos are also being sold.

Of interest within the text is:

[Ansel]Adams befriended Edwin H. Land, a Harvard University dropout who had invented the instant camera and founded the Polaroid company in 1937 with George Wheelwright.

Hmmm, Harvard dropout, sound familiar?

One notes that Land and Chester Carlson were evolving their respective technologies in the same time frame. Land had the misfortune to develop the technically-brilliant instant movie process just when personal videocams were taking off in the 1970's. Solid state image receptors have basically displaced Land's "fast chemistry" approach. A good invention, and an innovation, but displaced by something better.