Designing Polaroid

Abstract

While primarily known as a photographer of sweeping American landscapes, Ansel Adams also served as a corporate consultant, most notably for the electronics company Polaroid. During the course of his thirty-five-year-long consultancy, Adams tested every major Polaroid film and camera. This article argues that Adams’s consultancy was a form of design work, focused as he was on the usability and functionality of Polaroid prototypes, as well as the aesthetics of the test prints he produced. Occupying the roles of designer and user, Adams found that communicating effectively with engineers and scientists was far from straightforward, as he grappled with the problem of translating his experience with the prototypes into usable feedback that could be put into practice in Polaroid’s laboratories and eventually its factories. Adams’s consultancy, which functioned as a laboratory for examining his own aesthetic practice, also illuminates broader historical transitions in the relationship between artists and corporations in postwar American society.