Beginning in the 1940s, the Polaroid Corporation hired noted artists to test their film and cameras, and then acquired some of the results.
[2] The Polaroid Collection grew to include works by Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett and Adams himself.
[14] In 2011 the Westlicht Museum in Vienna, in collaboration with the Impossible Project, acquired a cache of 4400 prints from the collection that had been stored in Lausanne's Musée de l'Élysée.
[12] The two organizations paid $705,000 USD for the prints, which included works by Marina Abramović and Ulay, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Chuck Close, David Hockney and Andy Warhol.
[16][17] 1400 of the photos in the European sale were 20x24 inch Polaroids that had been produced under Land's Artists Support Program.