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-THE BITCOIN ISLAND LIFE-

Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Land, was an ingenious inventor and creative mastermind, regularly cited more than half a century later by Steve Jobs as a personal hero. But Land’s greatest skill was finding and cultivating potential. And the company had a secret source of talent: art history graduates from Smith College, a small women’s liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Perhaps the most notable Smith grad was Meroë Marston Morse. During her career, Morse became one of Polaroid’s most important visionaries—leading black-and-white photographic research, directing special photographic research, and registering 18 patents.

At the heart of her success was the commitment to developing a product that suited artists. She worked tirelessly with photographer Ansel Adams to ensure that the experience of Polaroid was professionally and artistically satisfying. Morse and others at Polaroid understood that the artists as much as the cameras themselves created the iconic imagery. Robert Mappelthorpe took Polaroid pictures of his muse Patti Smith, Chuck Close used them to create pixel-like, overscale self portraits, and Andy Warhol shot thousands of celebrity photos on his Big Shot camera. It was hardly an accident that the company’s cameras became a pop culture phenomenon.

And certainly, no one embodied Land’s ethos and work ethic more than Morse, who ran her lab literally around the clock. In one of her many letters to him, she wrote, “A day is all too short. It always seems to me that we just really get warmed up to our problems and then it’s time to quit.” Morse, like all of the other women behind the company’s cameras, embodied what Polaroid was all about: interdisciplinary excellence, boundless curiosity, and relentless effort.

📸: Test photograph of Meroë Morse with a Polaroid Land camera. (Harvard Business School Baker Library.)

Credits Goes to the respective

Author ✍️/ Photographer📸

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#Apocalypse #Music #Movies #Philosophy #Literature #scuba #architecture #art

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pam 7mo ago

love the story of Meroë Marston Morse and love how deeply she appreciated both the product and the people it served. Of late I can relate to this a lot "It always seems to me that we just really get warmed up to our problems and then it’s time to quit.” Another incredible women during that timeframe was Hedy Lamarr, she was highly artistic and inventive too. She helped Howard Hughes redesign a more aerodynamic airplane wings by combining drawings of birds and fish, and later co-invented frequency-hopping technology, which became a foundational concept for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.