The title, "Dr." sometimes attached to Land's name represents an honorary degree. Land was a self-made man, an inventor, engineer, and scientist.

During his student days at Harvard, he experimented with polarized light, and later found ways to use a light polarizing film in a variety of products, such as automobile headlights and sunglasses. He founded the Polaroid Corporation to develop those products.

In the 1940s he invented and marketed a self-processing black & white photographic film, which he refined significantly in later years. In 1963, he introduced a similar process for colour photography.

In the mid-1950s, while repeating James Clerk Maxwell's famous three-colour photographic experiment, as part of the early research for his colour film, he discovered that full colour images could be displayed using only two colours, rather than three. Periodically over the next two decades he executed significant research in the field of human colour vision, and ultimately postulated the Reflex Theory of Colour Vision to explain the phenomena he had discovered.