Brand Failures

Tired brands 275
actors James Garner and Mariette Hartley in romantic roles. Because of its
instantaneous nature, with photos developed in your hand seconds after they
were taken, the Polaroid identity became that of a fun, cool ‘live for the
moment’ kind of brand.
The 1970s also saw Polaroid develop an almost cult status, with various
high-profile figures becoming passionate fans of the brand. The art world,
in particular, became a fan of instant photography. This was no accident.
Edwin Land had understood that artists could help to legitimize his invention
since the 1950s. He had known that if Polaroid was seen as a novelty, or
a gimmick, the brand would die as quickly as it had emerged. He therefore
needed to establish Polaroid photography as a potential art form in its own
right.
In 1955 he had found the solution in the form of Ansel Adams, an
internationally acclaimed landscape photographer who had exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Adams was sent out to Yosemite
National Park in California to experiment with different types of Polaroid
film. Artistic photographs of snow-covered landscapes which rivalled much
of Adams former work were the end result. With the help of a ‘serious’
photographer such as Adams, Polaroid was now a brand to be treated with
respect. Such was this success that every time Land created a new film he
would invite photographers and artists to the Polaroid labs to see what they
thought. There is even an official Polaroid Collection of Art which has been
lovingly built up and now includes over 20,000 works.
By the mid 1970s, modern artists of a very different nature to Ansel Adams
became Polaroid devotees. Such luminaries as Andy Warhol, David Hockney,
William Wegman, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras and Marie Cosindas were
all big fans. Warhol, in particular, loved his Polaroid camera. He had it with
him at all times and snapped everyone he met on his hedonistic adventures
around Manhattan.
In an article which appeared in the Guardian in October 2001, Jonathan
Jones explained the connection between the Polaroid brand and the art
world:
Polaroid colour is intense, slightly unreal, adding its own sheen to an
image. This appealed to artists because it made explicit the artifice of
the photographic [. . .] The revolution that made Polaroid a universal
tool for artists, as well as a truly mass photographic method, was the