"The Most Basic Form of Creativity"

As he posed for TIME's cover portrait, Edwin Land at times seemed as shy and ill at ease as are most other people when facing a faceless lens. Yet the founder of Polaroid has had more opportunity than most professionals to consider photography both as science and art. In a rare interview with TIME Correspondent Philip Taubman, Land voiced some of his thoughts:

A PHOTOGRAPH fills different needs at different times in life. One of our deepest needs comes in early childhood. The world around the child is shifting and fleeting and unreliable and hazardous. It cannot be retained; it is constantly slipping away. To a child, a photograph gives a permanent thing that is both outside himself and part of himself. He gets a new kind of security from every picture he takes.

I remember the first picture that I developed as a child. It was a picture of our French poodle. The dog was really unavailable to me. He was always running away; there were things he had to do at night as he roamed through the countryside. Then there was the picture I took of him. There I had him. He couldn't get away.

As we grow older, photographs fill other needs. The world recedes from us. A photograph makes permanent our own perception of a portion of that world; particularly a perception that we care about.

I find each new person whom I meet a complete restatement of what life and the world are all about. The individualization of people--individualization of spirit, taste, emotion--this is what makes life ageless. For me, then, to search out people's faces, using photographs to retain some of what we see and feel when we are with them, is a very important application of photography.

Look at each of us right now. As we look around, this seems an unforgettable moment; yet we will forget it, and that's sad. A photograph could save it. If I were to take your picture, I would not be able to get into the picture everything I sense when I look at you, but I would capture enough of what I sense so that when I looked at the picture later it would bring back almost everything.

There are perceptions that people can never fully experience without photography. There is the type of scene caught by Cartier-Bresson--people running across a Paris street. That is action we would see only from the corner of our eye; yet he captures it permanently. His picture is not rigidification of the mobile; it is an entrapment of motion. Analogously, in Ansel Adams' monumental scenic pictures, the world stops for human time to flow by.

Irresistibly, you share a photograph with someone who is with you, and he or she gets a deeper insight into you as well as what you discerned. When you see the best picture I took of you, for example, you will know a little bit more, not just about yourself, but also about me. The fact that I could see you the way I did should be a comforting thing to you, because you know that a nebulous feeling you have about yourself, something you like about yourself, is transferable to someone else.

It bothers us at Polaroid to see a world that could be ever so much more tender and beautiful if the full potential of science were realized. We think photography is a field through which that potential can be achieved. That's the wonderful thing about photography--you can have an inner world of science and an outer world of aesthetics.

I think the new camera can have an impact on the way people live. I hope it can become a natural part of people. It can make a person pause in his rush through life. It will help him to focus himself on some aspect of life, and in the process, enrich his life at that moment. This happens as you focus through the view finder. It's not merely the camera you are focusing; you are focusing yourself. That's an integration of your personality, right that second. Then when you touch the button, what's inside you comes out. It's the most basic form of creativity. Part of you is now permanent.

At its best, photography can be an extra sense, or a reservoir for the senses. Even when you don't press the trigger, the exercise of focusing through a camera can make you better remember thereafter a person or a moment. When we had flowers in this office recently to use as test objects, it was a great experience to take pictures of them. I learned to know each rose. I now know more about roses and leaves, and that enriched my life. Photography can teach people to look, to feel, to remember in a way that they didn't know they could.

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