It’s apparently invention day here on the blog. This is a completely fascinating video of Walt Disney presenting their new MultiPlane camera in 1957, an incredibly advanced tool for its time. He’d have loved Pixar.
“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”
I completely devoured this lengthy profile on Edwin Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid. Here is what Time said about Polaroid in its cover story on the company in 1972:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Polaroid is that it has grown huge by creating products for which there was little detectable demand, until Edwin Land thought of them. Each is, as Land says, sui generis—in a class by itself. That distinction makes conventional market research, in the words of one of his marketing executives, “a waste of time and money.” Polaroid did not spend a single dollar trying to discern in advance whether people would actually buy the SX-70.
Reading that, you can’t help but draw a parallel between Land/Polaroid and Steve Jobs/Apple. I’ve long saw a connection between the two and the article goes further in highlighting how Jobs modeled much of Apple around Polaroid:
[F]or decades now, Apple’s founder has used the same template as Polaroid’s co-founder: dramatic unveiling, feature walkthrough, lavish praise, individual demos. Jobs may have perfected the reality-distortion field, but Edwin Land invented it. And they may have been the only two CEOs in tech-company history who could pull it off.
And even more interesting, both Land and Jobs were forced out of the companies they created only to have them falter after their exit. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the leading minds and visionaries of companies being forced out. Land and Jobs are two famous examples but what about Jack Dorsey at Twitter who recently returned to his company? I’m not really sure what it means but it’s a fascinating topic to look into.
The Cameraman is a beautiful animation from Chris Ware that was used as an intro to an episode of the short-lived The American Life television show. It was easily my favorite introduction in the entire two-season show and certainly a memorable story about a group of middle school students who, in a strange way, became disconnected from their environments when they started “filming” the world around them.
The actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a differing opinion:
But most of the time, I’d argue, having a camera and recording our world does just the opposite. It encourages the camera operator to engage, to pay attention and find that sweet shot, to figure out how to tell a good story.
In my opinion, our lives are little more than the stories we tell ourselves and each other. I’m quite certain that the massive increase in people walking around with cameras these days is far more than a passing trend. It’s a sign of progress towards a connected and engaged society. The technology is here. Now we just have to learn how to use it.
Last year I was at the MoMA in New York looking at a photography exhibit. There was a large group of young people who would get really close to the photographs and take a picture of them. I remember overhearing a older woman say to her friend that this concerned her. People never used to do that, she said. By taking a photo of the work for later, you are missing out on seeing the actually work in that moment. Part of going to a museum is to see art in a thoughtfully curated experience. Rushing through the gallery taking photos of each piece for later somehow defiles that constructed experience. It prevents us from being in that moment.
I agree with Gordon-Levitt in that the camera is helping us tell stories, but I can’t help but wonder if we are becoming more concerned with telling a good story instead of being present in each moment. A candid photo is no longer just a candid photo, it’s now a part of a larger story being told on Facebook and the other social networking sites. Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure. But I do think we are missing out on meaningful connections because a camera is in between us. He’s right, the technology is here and we need to learn how to use it. We need to find that place in the middle. That place where we can tell stories without missing out on the ones we are living.
“The camera is the least important part of photography.”
I just watched Visual Acoustics, a wonderful documentary on the most influencal architectural photographer in history. Having shot buildings for Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, and Richard Neutra his photographs has had just as much influence on modernism as the buildings themselves.
The Holga D is a digital version of the classic Holga camera:
It’s low-cost construction and simple meniscus plastic lens often crates vignetting, blur, light leaks, and other ‘qualities’ that’s unacceptable in the mainstream photography. But the quality problems have obtained a major cult following among some photographers, and has become really popular in recent years.
Count me in as intrigued. I love my “real” Holga and I’m very interested to see how this digital version performs. At one end, there is something strange about getting low quality film-like images—light leaks and all—from a digital camera, but from what I can see their approach makes sense. The lack of a LCD display on the back conjures up the delayed gratification of film and if the image examples are any indication, the results are very Holga-esque. Pair that with some gorgeous industrial design, this is something I could easily see picking up if the price was reasonable.
