MR. POLAROID Documentary Sets Premiere on PBS' AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Mr. Polaroid, a new documentary about Polaroid inventor Edwin Land, will premiere May 19, 2025, at 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on PBS. Over a half century ago, before the smartphone, Land was dreaming up “a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses.” He would also come to believe his company was “on its way to lead the world — perhaps even to save it.” Hubris, technology, brilliance, and a billion photographs a year are all part of the rollicking Polaroid story. The documentary is directed and written by Gene Tempest, produced by Amanda Pollak, edited by Josh Melrod, and executive produced by Cameo George.

The invention Edwin Land believed would change the world was sparked by a near-accident on a dark Connecticut road. At the age of 14, he vowed to invent a solution for headlight glare, which killed thousands of motorists a year, and was convinced that the solution lay in a physics phenomenon known as polarization. By 1937, at age 28, he had already founded his own company, Polaroid.

In the early years, Polaroid made sunglasses, camera lenses, glare-free windshields and headlights. But the tech he designed for carmakers never caught on. As his first great vision fizzled, Land found his way to a new field: photography. He had long believed that photography was perhaps humanity’s greatest invention. The problem, he thought, was that people were just too far removed from its magic.

After years of trials, in 1947, Land demonstrated a working scientific prototype of his Polaroid camera to the press; by the 1948 Christmas season, the first Polaroid went up for sale in Boston. It was an instant sensation, and Polaroid’s new kind of photography was on its way to profoundly changing how people documented their lives.

Everyone loved the immediacy, and the ability to take photographs that didn’t pass through the hands of middlemen afforded a new type of freedom. “You could take a Polaroid without the pressure of anyone external judging or controlling,” says photographer Rhiannon Adam. “It came with a sort of freedom to document your life as you were living it.”

The history of Land and Polaroid’s fall is as precipitous and revealing as that of his rise. Yet the magic of the Polaroid continues to hold sway. “It’s one of the most instantly recognizable brands ever,” Adam says. “And that sense of playfulness was really at the heart of the brand.”

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Mr. Polaroid will stream for free simultaneously with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS app, available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. The film will also be available for streaming with closed captioning in English and Spanish on the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE website.