photo by Donald Kinney
1966 seems to be the start of my Polaroid photography in conjunction with my 4x5 view camera, which meant carrying a bulky case and tripod most every place I went. And at $1.75 in "1966 money" a fellow had to shoot carefully so as not to waste any of the precious Polaroid Type52 packets.
I still had access to a darkroom when I first started using Polaroid, but the resulting quality with just one single Polaroid print was just as good if not better than what I could get with the film/print process--at least for me.
Ansel Adams did a lot of testing of Polaroid Type52 and even published The Polaroid Manual in 1963. I have a wonderful monograph of his exhibit "Singular Images" in 1974 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Lifting the words of Ansel Adams generously from the monograph:
"The recent advances in the Polaroid Land process open new vistas for functional and expressive photography. Not only does the process serve to 'check' lighting, exposure and composition in conventional photography, but -- and more important -- it is itself a new creative medium."
"It is unfortunate that so many photographers have thought of the Land camera as a 'toy', a casual device for 'fun' pictures, or, at best, a 'gadget' to make record pictures!' . . . The process has revolutionized the art and craft of photography -- and is still barely across the threshold of development."
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