More Than Instant Gratification American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection
by Charles Giuliano
With some one hundred works by fifty artists, drawn from the twenty-three thousand item corporate collection of the Cambridge, Massachusetts based, Polaroid corporation, this exhibition, "American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection," through January 26, was simply too big for a single, mid-sized exhibition venue. Accordingly, for the first time, the Photographic Resource Center, and the Boston University Art Gallery, just a brief walk from each other along the Boston University campus, have collaborated to present an exhibition of enormous historical significance.
This generous selection of work, vintage cameras, and archival materials represents some eighty percent of what was included in a major exhibition that opened at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and traveled to three other venues in Japan. To the best of my knowledge, this version of the exhibition, selected by Linda Brown for the PRC, and Stacey McCarroll for BU, will not travel in the US.
Given the enormous presence and influence of the Polaroid corporation in the Boston-Cambridge community it is most significant that, even in a reduced version, this work is being seen in Boston. In the area of photography Boston has long enjoyed unique status on a national and international basis. There have been many important factors through the years, for example, the tenure of Minor White at MIT is regarded as an epic influence. Also at MIT, the presence of Harold Edgerton and his strobe research, And, MIT’s, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, as well as its, Media Lab, have been other major research resources. Add to that the important programs in photography in the many area schools of art.
From the very beginning of the first camera developed by Edwin H. Land, in 1948, Model 95, the corporation began to hire major photographers as consultants. Among the very first recruited in 1949 were Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, William Clift, Nick Dean and John Benson. The company would continue to be most generous in providing equipment and film to major artists and photographers. While its primary market was the general public, with $1.3 billion in sales by 1983, it always explored instant photography, not just as instant gratification for a mass market but as a serious creative medium. In 1973, it opened the Clarence Kennedy Gallery in Cambridge as a showcase for experimental photography using its materials. Also, several large-format studios were created with broad access by artists.
In recent years, however, much of this creative activity has been downscaled and or eliminated. The gallery closed some years ago and the Polaroid Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring in 2001. The company has since been purchased by One Equity Partners but retains its name and brand identity. With broad availability of fast print processing and digital photography Polaroid had endured strong competition for its market share. At its peak, in 1983, it held some one thousand patents but since then its research and development, and marketing strategies have not always been successful.
A significant turning point occurred with the death of Land, at age 82, in 1991. Truly, Land, who was the heart mind and soul of Polaroid was a true genius who dropped out of Harvard, after his freshman year in 1926, and, by 1928, had created the first synthetic sheet polarizer. While Land is accurately described as one of the remarkable scientists and inventors of his generation, as this tandem of exhibitions aptly demonstrates, he and his company, had a sensitivity and passion for creativity.
The direct impact on artists has been remarkable. For me, personally, it started in the 1950s. As a teenager, I received a Polaroid camera for Christmas. That day, I exhausted my stash of film making instant portraits of our family. I hungered for more material. My mother, a physician, had a patient who worked for Polaroid and would bring me boxes of film at reduced rates. I vividly recall the excitement of watching a print develop followed by the ritual of coating the images. This was to prevent fading and chemical alteration but most of those images eventually got funky. Like many other early experimenters that led to abandoning the material and seeking other forms of photography. But, as it has for millions of individuals, then and now, it jump started me into a life long interest in photography.
This two venue exhibition presents some of the super stars of the medium. Walking into the BU gallery the centerpiece is a life sized, narrow, vertical self portrait by Lucas Samaras. It is a strong and appropriate introduction. Samaras seems to be all over the exhibition in several different sections and sub headings. He is one of the artists most strongly identified with the medium. There are the self portraits, as well as, small images with manipulated emulsion, and panoramas pasting together, narrow, vertical slits of cut prints creating stretched images of his reclining body.
Jogging just to the left and right of the huge Samaras self portrait, one finds a signature self portrait by Andy Warhol, in large format, with eyes closed. Seemingly sleeping or lost in thought. To the left, is a famous large self portrait, full face, in several segments, shot separately by Chuck Close. In the BU portrait segment are three SX-70 head shots by Warhol of Truman Capote, Farrah Faucett, and Ted Kennedy. In his glory days, as a celebrity groupie, Andy apparently never left home for a round of parties without his tape recorder and Polaroid camera.
There are, apparently, a vast number of these Warhol instant prints. Andy was certainly an instant gratification, no heavy lifting or daunting technology, kind of guy. Many of these snap shot portraits became the basis of the more famous and expensive silk screen portraits. But these three sketches of celebrities allow us to visualize his creative process at its spontaneous inception.
If Warhol’s images are compelling for their celebrity subjects, the images of Shelby Adams, also in the BU show, have an appeal on the other end of the spectrum. The artist has created riveting images of his neighbors in Appalachia. He has long since left his childhood home but continues to go back to his roots to explore the unique and inbred, impoverished, culture of the mountain based people.
Also at BU is a horizontal, two-tiered, grid of large format images of the Cuban born and Boston based artist, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons. There is a performative element as she posed before the camera using a range of props to evoke her native Santeria. We see details of head and body parts with markings of paint and manipulations of beads. The colors are rich and saturated.
The PRC show is divided into several, well-defined categories: Composites, Photos of Photos, Manipulation/Process, Images of/ From Pop Culture, and Composing the Still Life.
The centerpiece and showstoppers are several large format works by Robert Heinecken. He has created images comprising an Upper Middle Class Nuclear Family. In these he created full length, life size, figures by crushing and combining, in a loose and wacky manner, pages ripped out of magazines. The result, while crude and roughly collaged, is amazingly cohesive. He gets us to believe in these ersatz Frankenstein examples of the living, media dead. Out there. As we have come to expect from this brilliant and eccentric artist.
In the category of, Composites, there is a key example of the oeuvre of David Hockney, a large format Polacolor Photograph of an original collage, Interior, Pembroke Studios, 1986. In the image we see his approach to fractured cubist space, a sense of time and space. He simulates the evolution from static cubism to dynamic futurism. While the Hockney continues to be fresh and fascinating, a similar multi-valent approach in a work by Joyce Neimans, M.H., 1985, hung nearby, now seems like a period piece. It is assembled from a plethora of SX-70 prints in which she has painted with silver its signature white edges. This becomes disruptive when trying to see the figure as a whole rather than the sum of its parts.
Among the most creative and over the top works in these shows are two staged and concocted fantasy/fiction works by Patrick Nagatani/ Andree Tracey. They elaborately create set pieces with models and props evoking aspects of nuclear bombs. In one work as group of Japanese men wearing scuba goggles wield SX-70 cameras to photograph a nuclear blast. Shades of Los Alamos. While above a gaggle of Polaroid snap shots dangle on strings seemingly flying from their cameras. The work has a grim humor.
Because of the unwieldy nature of working with a large view camera to make 29×22" images in the Polaroid studio, many artists have opted to make still life setups. This is a particularly rich category of material well represented by superb images by Boston’s Olivia Parker, and Bela Kalman. In a somewhat smaller format is another still life by another Boston based artist, Marie Cosindas. It is unfortunate that none of her seminal portrait work is included in this survey and this important artist, who has made unique contributions to this material, is represented by a single image.
Perhaps it is most important to conclude that this exhibition, however diverse and instructive, just skims the surface of an enormous corporate collection. Once the corporation is on more secure footing we may hope and pray that Polaroid will recommit to its artist related and exhibition programming. It is a remarkable creative legacy.
The Boston University Art Gallery Photographic Resource Center at Boston University through January 26
No catalogue but essays by curators Linda Brown and Stacey McCarroll in the November December issue (volume 26, number 6) of In the Loupe, the newsletter of the Photographic Resource Center
Charles Giuliano is a Boston based artist, curator and critic. He is an editor of Art New England, contributor to NY Arts Magazine, and the director of exhibitions for The New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University. He is represented by Flatfiles Gallery in Chicago.
