Meet the woman who made Polaroid into a cultural icon

Polaroid. The iconic camera brought photography into the hands of millions beginning in the 1940s. It made anyone a photographer with a push of a button, developing the pictures right in front of your eyes.

At a time when camera innovation was led almost exclusively by men, Polaroid was different in another way too: During her relatively short time at the company, a young art history grad named Meroë Marston Morse was one of Polaroid’s most important visionaries, ultimately rising to be director of the Special Photographic Research Division with 18 patents to her name.

As a senior photo editor at National Geographic, I have had a lifelong love for photography. Since I was a child, I remember watching family members use Polaroids to record the mundane moments of a vacation, while I used a Nikon camera with 35mm film. But when a photographer friend later showed me how to use a toothpick to push the dyes of a Polaroid that was mid-development—resulting in a more painterly, more impressionistic final image—I became a fan.

I know a fair bit about Polaroid and its founder, Edwin Land. But when I read Morse’s name for the first time recently, I was intrigued to learn more about role she played during her two decades there.

A new kind of camera company

Morse joined Polaroid in 1945 just weeks after graduating from Smith College, having studied art history with Clarence Kennedy. A friend and associate of Edwin Land, Kennedy often recommended his best students to work at the camera company.

For Land, Morse became “a soul mate, a work mate, and a protector,” writes Victor K. McElheny in his biography of Edwin Land, Insisting on the Impossible. Morse was a natural to the Polaroid method, which McElheny quotes one of the company’s inventors as saying was, “to propose the hypothesis, to test the hypothesis, to modify the hypothesis, to test with another experiment—a sequential train moving at high speed, several hypotheses and experiments per hour.”

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A few short months after her arrival, Morse was managing the black-and-white film division, where she led her team through round-the-clock shifts to transition the company away from monochromatic sepia prints to truly black and white Polaroid films.

The process was full of challenges. Not only did the crystals in the darkest areas of a print become reflective, but the paper they used collected fingerprints easily. Perhaps worst of all, some of the prints would fade after a few months. Chris Bonanos, whose book Instant documents the camera company’s history, writes that Land called the creation of black-and-white film “among the toughest things Polaroid ever pulled off.”

And Morse was at the center of it all, former Polaroid employees John and Mary McCann told me on a recent call. Morse’s team would analyze tiny incremental variances from a standard exposure Mary said, and Morse herself “had an eye for these differences” thanks to her art history training. “She and Land built it from the first experiments in the lab, all the way through the billion-dollars-worth of film they sold,” John adds.

A marriage of science and art

John McCann tells me his time at Polaroid reminded him of the Renaissance, when “the best scientists were the best painters, and they did everything.” Artists at Polaroid were integral to science and experimentation, and their perspectives were as important as those of trained chemists.

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Within Morse’s lab, there was a strong dedication to making technology to suit artists. She served as the liaison between scientists and the photographers who consulted for the companies—building relationships with fine art photographer Minor White, color art photography pioneer Marie Cosindas, and landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

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Adams was already a well-established, large-format, black-and-white photographer by the time he began to consult for Polaroid in 1948. His image, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, made in 1927, had landed him on the photography map. Yet Adams was very interested in Polaroid’s technology, particularly the cameras and the black-and-white film that Morse was developing. The two were in nearly constant contact.

Adams helped establish a process that photographers in the field used for feedback long before the advent of the digital camera: He would take a Polaroid to test the composition and exposure of an image before making a final image on the negative.

Legacy

Morse died from cancer in 1969 at the age of 46, before Polaroid had expanded into a global brand and cultural touch point, before the toy camera craze had peaked, and long before Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

In a companywide memo announcing her passing, Polaroid executive Richard Young wrote, “To those who knew and loved Meroe, our lives were enriched and enlarged. Her kindness, concern and interest in everyone were exceeded by her generosity.”

By the 1970s and 80s, other camera companies started to emulate Polaroid’s point-and-shoot approach and aesthetic. In the late 2000s, photographers around the world went into mourning when the last Polaroid films hit their expiration dates after the company’s bankruptcy.

But in early 2008, as the last factories were winding down, Polaroid enthusiasts Florian ‘Doc’ Kaps and André Bosman raised over half a million dollars to rescue the factories, the film, and most importantly the chemistry knowledge of the company—and eventually they brought Polaroid film back to market.

Today, in a photography world where digital is king, the spirit that Morse and others brought to the company still lives on for photographers everywhere.