Prospero | Polaroid photography

Instant forever

The unique character of Polaroid pictures has inspired some remarkable works of art

By G.P. | POUGHKEEPSIE

WITH the possible exception of the keyhole, there is no frame for an image more familiar than the white border of a Polaroid instant photograph. Anchored by a thick strip that acts as a plinth for the picture above, a Polaroid imbues even the hastiest snapshots with a certain artistic flair.

When Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid, first unveiled his instant camera in 1947, such thoughts were at the front of his mind. “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic,” he declared, “to make available a new medium of expression to numerous individuals who have an artistic interest in the world around them.” This was not just product-launch hyperbole. By 1949, Land had placed Ansel Adams, a revered photographer of the American landscape, on a monthly retainer as a consultant.

When Land saw how useful Adams was in suggesting improvements to his product he began Polaroid’s Artist Support Program which offered grants of cameras and film to artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in order to have his products tested to their limits. As a result Polaroid amassed more than 16,000 fine-art photographs. This collection was both a technical and a visual documentation of the company’s products, and it helped to dispel any notions of disposability that the word “instant” implied. Even after Polaroid cameras became a mass-market commodity—in the 1960s almost half of America’s households owned one—Polaroid maintained a connection to the art world.

That connection is fully explored in “The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation”, the largest museum survey of artwork made with Polaroid cameras ever held in America, at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre at Vassar College in upstate New York. Bringing together some 40 artists from the launch of Polaroid’s ultra-portable SX-70 camera in 1972 until the present, this revelatory exhibition shows how Land really did create “a new medium of expression.”

The photographs taken by Ansel Adams, represented here by four tightly cropped colour studies, are a fine example of how the Polaroid technology encouraged artists to experiment with new ideas. The sumptuous tones in “Rusted Blue Metal”(1972)—mottled-ochre rust spots and deep worn blues—are an intimate counterpoint to the stark black-and-white landscapes stretching into infinity for which he is best known. For other artists the diminutive size of the Polaroid photo lends itself to montage. David Hockney’s dazzling portrait, “David Graves Pembroke Studios London Tuesday, 27 April 1982” (1982), is composed of 120 separate photographs that create an almost Cubist immersion in the subject. The Polaroids’ white frames give the piece a luminescent framework reminiscent of a stained glass window.

Freed from the judgmental eye of the photo developer, and police, the Polaroid was often favoured by those wishing to create intimate or explicit images. But the arrival of the SX-70 camera model in 1972, the lightest and easiest to use Polaroid yet, led to a boom in DIY pornography. Some insinuated that the model’s name was missing a vowel. Jack Butler’s “Sex 70s” series (1978, pictured right) plays with this new-found freedom, depicting magazine cuttings of females appearing to be undressed by the photographer’s oversize hand. Lucas Samarras went one step further. His “Photo-Transformations”series (1973-76) is a collection of nude self-portraits in which the Polaroid itself has been teased and tortured—its photographic emulsion worked with sharp implements and its chemicals baked or frozen, in order to create a sort of mutilated hallucination on the hinterland between photography and painting.

Despite such obvious surface alterations, a Polaroid photograph has no separate negatives that can be manipulated and it cannot be seamlessly altered like a digital image. This gained it a reputation for being an authentic record of reality. Dash Snow plays with this idea of truth in a quasi-documentary series of Polaroids which invite the viewer to become a voyeur into his seemingly bohemian life (pictured above). Yet he has burnt and defaced the Polaroids themselves, hiding and disfiguring the characters within. Is this an extension of the violent debauchery evident in the photographs? Or a warning that even in Polaroids not everything should be believed?

After struggling for a decade and filing for bankruptcy twice (in 2001 and 2008) Polaroid stopped producing instant film in 2008. But the demand for instant film, and the creative possibilities the technology offers, is still strong. Fortunately for artists and devotees, a group of Polaroid enthusiasts set up The Impossible Project in the same year. Impossible leases the last remaining instant film-production plant in Enschede in the Netherlands (which used to be Polaroid’s European headquarters) and now produces instant film materials for traditional Polaroid cameras. It is creating new instant film types too. Last year it sold more than 700,000 film packs. This year it hopes to reach 1m. (Polaroid now favours the digital-camera market and continues to make only one classic analog camera, the 300 model, which uses business-card size instant film.)

But why do people still want Polaroid photographs in an age when digital-camera filters and photo apps can exactly mimic Polaroid’s aesthetic? Florian Kaps, The Impossible Project’s Austrian founder, believes the answer lies in the uniqueness of the object itself. "The Polaroid is really one-of-a-kind photography. Each time you look at the image you can be sure the artist himself touched it.”

Mr Kaps likens the Polaroid’s appeal to the slow-food movement, or the continued popularity of vinyl records. It is not so much a nostalgic preference as a tactile, corporeal one, “because you are part of the process of the photo becoming an image, the whole thing becomes more valuable.” While many were afraid digital would kill analog technologies, explains Kaps, “digital actually created a demand for the physical.” As one of Polaroid’s old advertising jingles once sang, “It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive.”

“The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation” is at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York until June 30th 2013

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