Twenty years ago, the Polaroid Corp. donated its archives to Harvard Business School. They comprise some 1.5 million items: cameras and photographs as well as memos and budgets and patent applications. There are a lot of applications. The US Patent Office granted Edwin Land, the firm’s legendary founder, 535 of them.
Such innovativeness helped make Polaroid — which was founded in Cambridge, in 1937, and filed for bankruptcy in 2001 — one of the most remarkable corporate enterprises of the last century. No small part of that remarkableness was the company’s emphasis on not just commerce and technology but also art and design. Land understood how much the latter could contribute to the former. There’s a reason — many of them, actually — why Steve Jobs so admired Land and that Polaroid has been called the Apple of its day.
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In 2017, HBS offered the first of a planned trio of exhibitions drawn from its Polaroid holdings: “At the Intersection of Science and Art — Edwin H. Land and the Polaroid Corporation: The Formative Years.” That’s an even longer title than the second exhibition’s, “From Concept to Product: Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s Culture of Art and Innovation, 1945-1969.”
That show, which runs at the business school’s Baker Library through April 18, was curated by Harvard’s Melissa Banta, who also did the honors for its predecessor. In addition to many photographs, there are letters, diagrams, books, vintage magazines, and three cameras. One of them is a Polaroid Swinger (It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive/It’s only 19 dollars and 95), as much of a must-have mid-’60s item as a copy of “Rubber Soul” or pair of white jeans.
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With its blend of the exotic and plain, the name “Meroë Morse” could belong to a Henry James heroine — or, more likely, the heroine’s cousin. She joined Polaroid’s research department fresh out of Smith College. Although Morse, an art history major, had no background in business or science, she quickly rose at Polaroid, becoming manager of black-and-white photographic research, then director of special photographic research.
The reason for that first date in the subtitle, 1945, would seem obvious. Polaroid vastly grew during World War II, doing multiple war-related projects for the Pentagon. By 1947, when Land introduced instant photography, sales had dropped by nearly 90 percent. It was only after the war that Polaroid largely shifted to consumer products.
But 1945 has a specific significance here: It’s when Morse went to work for Polaroid (1969 was when she died, only 46, of cancer). Having her as linchpin of the exhibition makes sense. She was that important to the company. She was also representative. Her going to Smith and having a background in art history made her so.
Land was nearly as good at marketing as he was at inventing. He grasped that associating Polaroid with artistic aspirations would give the company cachet. He was friendly with a Smith art historian, Clarence Kennedy, who influenced Land’s views about the value of art in relation to Polaroid. Additionally, Kennedy helped set up a pipeline to bring Smith graduates to the company. At a time when women were as rare in positions of authority in US corporations as they were in US politics, Polaroid was very much an exception. Its corporate culture emphasized excellence and innovation, two qualities that were, and are, sex blind. Morse was the chief example, but by no means the only one.
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Among her duties was to serve as liaison with Ansel Adams. Kennedy had introduced Land and Adams in 1948. A year later he started working for Polaroid as a consultant. The relationship lasted until his death, in 1984. The archive has 10,000 Adams test photographs and 3,000 memos from him.
The partnership with Adams proving such a success Morse encouraged corporate connections with other photographers, including Paul Caponigro, Marie Cosindas, and Brett Weston. This led to the establishment of Polaroid’s Artist Support Program, giving cameras and film gratis to serious photographers. The program really took off, as did Polaroid, with the introduction of its SX-70 camera. That was in 1972. As the Swinger had been a defining consumer product of the ‘60s, so was the SX-70 of the ‘70s, only more so. But that story awaits the third, as yet unscheduled, exhibition.
Visitors should be aware that although “From Concept to Product” is in the Baker Library’s North Lobby, there are also displays in two flanking galleries. They should also pick up a copy of the exhibition brochure — though “brochure” doesn’t do it justice. Comprehensive, informative, and extensively illustrated, it does the work of a catalog, only in a user-friendly fashion. It has a further virtue: Like the show, it’s free. How often does that particular word get heard on the HBS campus?
FROM CONCEPT TO PRODUCT: Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s Culture of Art and Innovation, 1945-1969
Baker Library, Harvard Business School, 25 Harvard Way, through April 18.
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617-495-6411, www.library.hbs.edu/special-collections-and-archives/exhibits
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.