Polaroid Rage

Founded in 1937, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2008, a casualty of the digital age. (This, you may remember, caused mass panic and hoarding among photographers and collectors until it was learned Polaroid film would still be produced—the same, but different.) So it was with great prescience that in the late 60s, the company’s founder Edwin Land launched a project where he invited more than 800 artists around the world to shoot whatever they pleased using Polaroid film. More than 4,500 works—by the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, and Helmut Newton—were submitted, amassed and archived at Polaroid’s Frankfurt headquarters. Now, these little one-click wonders have been compiled in a new book, From Polaroid to Impossible

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