Do you take photos with your cell phone, slap a filter on them and then upload them to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter? Then you are acting in the spirit of a 75-year-old invention by US American Edwin Land, who presented the first instant camera in New York on February 21, 1947. The invention took off - a bit like the cell phone cameras of recent decades. And various smartphone apps are still imitating the charm of the devices today.

Land's first camera was the Model 95 and, looking back, the name of his company makes the scope of its technical revolution clear: Polaroid. The name has since become synonymous with photography: people didn't just take photos, they snapped Polaroids! Land invented the camera after his daughter asked him one day why she couldn't see photos immediately.

A milestone in photography

The scientist tinkered: "I could see what the Polaroid camera was supposed to be. It was just as real to me as if it were sitting in front of me before I had ever built one," he once explained. But what many people today associate primarily with fun and party photography was a milestone in many areas at the time.

Crime scene investigators could quickly and easily take photos that could be used directly in files or on blackboards. Doctors used them in a similar way and took pictures of their patients. Instant cameras were also an advantage for aid workers, who in many parts of the world would not have had access to laboratories for developing film.

However, the new technology also had disadvantages, which is why the conventional camera with black-and-white or color film continued to be used by many people. This was mainly due to the price of the fast images that came out of the camera with a quiet whirring sound. Polaroids and images from competing brands were many times more expensive than those from the laboratory. In addition, the cameras remained bulky for a long time and did not fit in every pocket.

Emotional attachment to the technology

For many people, however, the photos taken with instant cameras embodied more than just speed, but above all, in retrospect, an attitude to life. Slightly overdriven colors, the slow fading, the vignette at the edges: All of this created an aesthetic that contributed to the retro hype in the multimedia sector in recent years.

In 2019, half a million instant cameras were sold in Germany, according to the German Photo Industry Association - more than twice as many as in 2016. In the past two years, the number has fallen again slightly, but has remained high. The devices were mainly bought by teenagers and people in their 20s. Experts also explain the trend with the boom in retro-inspired digital photo apps such as Instagram, which are bringing young buyers back to analog cameras.

From "instant camera" to Instagram

Instagram in particular, which is based on the "instant camera" in its name, plays with the chic of instant cameras. An earlier icon for the software was a camera that looked suspiciously similar to a Polaroid model. In the app, users can set all kinds of filters that distort the image and in many cases imitate their decades-old predecessors. In some programs, the white frames of the instant photos can also be added.

Polaroid went bankrupt in 2001 in the wake of digitization and the success of the digital camera, but the traditional name is now being used again to produce cameras - by a company that originally started out as a fan project in the Netherlands. But it is above all the idea of the - often imperfect, unreal and therefore attractive - instant photo that lives on in the digital age in smartphone apps. A snapshot, as light as if you were looking at the world through sunglasses.