At Smithsonian magazine, Owen Edwards remembers the Polaroid camera:

Sitting at lunch, [Richard] Avedon would snap a picture, and with a fun-house whir a blank square would emerge from the front of the camera and develop before our eyes. Had Prospero himself appeared wielding a magic wand, he couldn’t have caused more amazement. According to Sean Callahan, a founding editor of American Photographer magazine, the SX-70 constituted “the most sophisticated and innovative consumer product of its time.” The genesis of the little wonder machine, the story goes, was that Land’s young daughter asked why she couldn’t see the vacation photos her father was taking “right now.” Polaroid was already a successful optical company; in 1947 Land and his engineers began producing cameras using peel-and-develop film, first black-and-white, then color.

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