Polaroid 7001955

History

Edwin Land demonstrated the first instant camera publicly in 1947 and began commercial sales of the Model 95 in 1948, starting a product line that Polaroid would develop intensively through the 1950s. The early Land cameras were large and relatively expensive; Land and Polaroid's engineering effort through the early 1950s was directed at reducing size and cost to reach a broader consumer market.

By 1955 the Land Camera line had expanded across multiple price points. The 700 sat within a family of cameras differentiated primarily by shutter quality, lens aperture, and cosmetic finish. The higher-end cameras of the period - notably the 800 introduced around the same time - offered faster lenses or more capable shutters; the 700 was aimed at the mainstream consumer who wanted accessible instant photography at a lower price point.

The roll-film Land cameras were all superseded by the pack-film system introduced with the Polaroid 100 Land Camera in 1963, which replaced the messy roll-film process with cleaner peel-apart pack film and eliminated the chemical coating step. The 700 and its contemporaries became obsolete almost overnight as Polaroid transitioned its entire consumer line to pack film. Today, Type 40 roll-film is no longer manufactured, making these cameras collector objects rather than shooting cameras.

Why It Matters

The Polaroid 700 and its immediate peers represent the period when instant photography became a mass-market phenomenon rather than a novelty or professional tool. The cameras of this generation were sold through department stores and camera shops across the United States through the mid-1950s, reaching households that had never previously owned a camera capable of producing a finished print in under two minutes. The cultural impact of instant photography was substantial: seeing a developed photograph within a minute of taking it changed how ordinary people thought about photography's relationship to memory and time.

Technically, the 700 is not a landmark camera in the way the SX-70 or the original Model 95 are. It is significant as evidence of Polaroid's manufacturing and distribution scale by the mid-1950s: the ability to produce and sell tiered consumer instant cameras at volume established the commercial foundation that financed the more ambitious engineering of later decades.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• The Land Camera line of this period was used by American photojournalists for quick reference prints and by portrait studios for client approval shots.
• Ansel Adams had a long professional relationship with Polaroid (he served as a consultant to Edwin Land beginning in 1948), though his documented camera use centered on the technical models rather than consumer variants like the 700.
• The cameras of this generation appear frequently in 1950s American advertising and editorial photography as props and lifestyle symbols of modern domesticity.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Polaroid 700 - model identification and specifications.
• Wikipedia: Land camera - roll-film era history and family context.
• Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012) - the commercial history of Polaroid's consumer expansion in the 1950s.
• Peter Buse, The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2016) - cultural analysis of the instant photography phenomenon.