In an era of smartphones and accelerated digital networks, photographic instantaneity has become a commonplace. In the early years of Kalanag’s show, however, this photograph would have been a sensation, especially since neither a camera nor a photographer had been visible on stage at any point prior to its appearance. Rubber-stamped in green ink on its reverse with the words “Kalanag’s Magical Flashfoto,” Müller’s souvenir even bore a timestamp of sorts handwritten on the envelope: forty-seven minutes past six in the evening, on 11 March 1954.
According to Edwin Land’s biographer Victor K. McElheny, the inventor’s early interest in science was encouraged by his fascination with optical toys, in particular during visits to his hometown library where Land later recalled that “the chief delight” had been a Brewster stereoscope.9 Land’s later pioneering photographic work tends to eclipse his first, and arguably more pervasive, invention: the glare-reducing polarizing technology found on windows, car windshields, and sunglasses worldwide. A 1938 Reader’s Digest article entitled “The Magic of Polaroid” opens with a description of Land’s “strange new product” and its use within the observation car of the Union Pacific’s railway streamliner City of Los Angeles, whose circular “magic windows” could be variably adjusted to control the passage of light.10 In his 2016 cultural history of Polaroid photography, The Camera Does the Rest, Peter Buse shows how terminology derived from magic, and in particular conjuring, was continually associated with Land and his company’s products. When Life celebrated the arrival in 1972 of a newly compact Polaroid model, the magazine’s coverline linked the inventor’s creative genius directly to his “magic camera.”11Commentators elsewhere noted Land’s “photographic legerdemain” and “technological wizardry.” Such was his reputation as an industry showman that one journalist went so far as to describe Polaroid’s yearly corporate gatherings as “Dr. Land’s Annual Magic Show.”12