Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land Lecture by Victor K. McElheney

Dr. Victor K. McElheny details the creation of America’s onetime favorite camera in “Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land,” a lecture in conjunction with the exhibit A Passionate Light: Polaroids of H. Joe Waldrum. The free lecture is at 6 pm on Friday, March 18, in the History Museum Auditorium.

McElheny will also speak at 1 pm on Sunday, March 20, at The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. A Passionate Light is a joint exhibit of Waldrum’s SX-70 monoprints from the collections of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives.

Edwin Land was an inventor, businessman, war contractor and war contractor who was one day inspired by his 3-year-old daughter’s plea to instantly see a photograph he had taken of her. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had invented the first modern filters to polarize light (patented in 1929) and had formed a company to market them for use in sunglasses, glare-free car headlights and stereoscopic (virtual 3-D) photography.

In 1937, he founded the Polaroid Corporation and in 1947 introduced the first system of one-step photography. The Polaroid Land Camera was first offered for sale in 1948, and Land continued to improve upon it. Polacolor film was introduced in 1963 and, in 1972, the SX-70 replaced the wet, peel-apart development process with dry film that developed in light.

Land is second only to Thomas Edison in the number of patents he received (535). During the Cold War, he served as a science adviser to President Eisenhower and spearheaded development of the U-2 spy plane and NASA.

Victor K. McElheny is a distinguished science writer whose work has appeared in The Charlotte Observer, Science magazine, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. At The Times during the 1970s, he founded one of the first technology columns in American newspapers. In 1983, he helped found the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT. His books include Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land; Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution; and Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project.

A Passionate Light: Polaroids of H. Joe Waldrum features a total of 1,202 4½” x 3¼” images (264 at the New Mexico History Museum; 938 at The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History). Waldrum, a noted painter and print-maker, was entranced by what he could achieve with SX-70 monoprints, and his collection was recently donated to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. For the exhibit, Mary Anne Redding, curator of the Photo Archives, has chosen images that range from Waldrum’s studies of northern New Mexico churches to the delicate transiency of flowers.