Concorde and staff, from the series Britons by Neal Slavin.
These photos were taken using a 20×24 Polaroid camera. In his introduction to the book, the founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Colin Ford, describes the process:
The Polaroid 20″ x 24″ Instant Land Camera is a formidable beast, calling for a team of handlers to transport it, feed it, keep it in good temper and bed it down for the night. When you face the brute in order to be photographed, however, you know without doubt that you are participating in an event larger than life: everyone in the pictures stretches nerve and sinew to give of their best, and such superhuman efforts are rewarded by the pure magic of that moment when the huge print is peeled off, seconds after exposure. I have never seen anyone fail to be astonished — even moved — by the quality, the rich color, and the sheer impact of the result.
Ford died earlier this year; the Guardian's obituary is worth reading, if only for the reminder of how recently - the 1970s - photography was pushed to be seen as a worthy art form:
In 1975, an album that the portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron assembled in the 1860s for the astronomer Sir John Herschel was sold at Sotheby’s to a US collector. Colin intervened to get the export licence stopped, the first time that the designation of outstanding cultural significance had been applied to photography.
