About
The Polaroid Corporation's own collection of instant photographs was begun by Edwin Land, who founded the company, and the photographer Ansel Adams. It now holds some 23,000 images by hundreds of photographers around the world.
The Polaroid Book draws on that archive for more than 250 works, among them pieces by David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Jeanloup Sieff. The images come from the company's own holdings, so the book reads as a view into a working corporate collection and not a general survey of instant photography. It runs to 456 pages in hardcover, and the text is set in English, French and German.
Barbara Hitchcock supplies the essay. She is director of cultural affairs for the Polaroid Corporation in Waltham, Massachusetts, and she writes about the beginnings of instant photography and the history of the collection. That puts the account of how the archive was assembled in the hands of someone who worked inside the company that assembled it. A separate chapter turns to the cameras themselves and shows the various types of Polaroid camera that produced the pictures.
Steve Crist, a California native, edited the book. The Polaroid Book, 45th Edition, from Taschen, pairs more than 250 images from the Polaroid Collections with an essay by the company's own director of cultural affairs, which makes it a record of the archive as much as a picture book.
