POLAROID: THE INSTANT ICON

Click. The shutter snaps; time stops. That’s what a camera does: it captures a moment. Traps. Freezes. Not so very long ago, we had to be selective about which moments we preserved. Film was finite. Negatives required laborious development. Every bad shot represented wasted money, time, and effort. At the level of material and process, a photograph was serious.

Unless you were shooting Polaroid.

Introduced by inventor Edwin Land in 1948, the instant camera brought a footloose and fancy-free spirit to photography. Its innovation was to jam an entire darkroom into the camera itself, with early Polaroid models partially developing the film internally by bursting pods of chemical goo. The release of the folding SX-70 in 1972 and the white-bordered film engineered to fit it debuted the Polaroid as we know it today. Hailed by Popular Science as “the most fiendishly clever invention in the history of photography,” the camera produced glossy three-by-four-inch images that prefigured the smartphone snap, complete with its skeuomorphic click.

Now it’s click, click, click all the time — a near-continuous record of existence. For this, there is also a Polaroid precursor: Andy Warhol’s Family Album, a visual diary composed of many hundreds of SX-70 Polaroids shot by the artist between 1972 and 1973, depicting his friends and collaborators, celebrities he encountered, himself, and his dog. A selection is now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in Andy Warhol: Family Album, open through October 19. Summer may be the ideal moment to see it. This is, after all, peak picture-taking season, the time of beach holidays and trendy fro-yo — the more picturesque the better. The giddy banality of it all would make Andy smile.

Warhol was one of several artists invited to try out the SX-70 system when it launched. Through its Artist Support Program, Polaroid gave Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Evans, Lucas Samaras, and others access to the then-experimental technology.

Samaras noticed that the image remained malleable for several minutes after ejection from the camera, an observation that led him to create his series of “photo-transformations”: self-portraits he subjected to various chemical interventions. Some of the work he produced in his Upper West Side apartment between 1973 and 1976 is overtly figurative, distinguished by a lurid, supersaturated palette; another group comprises molten close-ups of body parts and has something of the look — and much of the tortured energy — of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Evans, meanwhile, found late-career inspiration in the Polaroid. Prior to his death in 1975, he went walkabout with his SX-70, taking odd little photos of houses, street signs, litter, and occasionally people. Notably, given his longstanding commitment to black-and-white photography, the last photos Evans took — his Polaroids — are in color. “The immediacy of the format fit perfectly with his search for a succinct yet lyrical view of the world around him,” noted fan Gregory Crewdson, speaking to Vogue apropos a show of Evans’s Polaroids in 2011.

Evans wasn’t the only founding master of American photography to embrace the instant image: Ansel Adams, his onetime rival, was one of Polaroid’s earliest champions. Impressed by the nascent technology, Adams offered his services as a consultant and went on to test successive iterations of the company’s cameras and film at his studio in Carmel, California, from the late 1940s onward. Adams also served as a Polaroid spokesperson, helped advance the company’s outreach to artists, and prompted it to create its own art collection. His relationship with Polaroid continued until his death in 1984.

By then, the instant camera had become a fixture of popular culture, embraced across creative disciplines. David Hockney debuted his first composite Polaroid portraits in 1982; fashion photographers Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin adopted the format, as did directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders — and Wenders’s cinematographer Robby Müller, who had a particular affection for the Polaroid’s milky finish. Maripol’s nonstop documentation of New York City’s downtown demimonde during the late 1970s and early 1980s earned her the nickname “Queen of the Polaroid.” “My Polaroid camera was non-threatening,” she later noted, explaining how she scored her on-the-spot portraits of Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Grace Jones, and other notables of that era. Cady Noland, meanwhile, used Polaroids to document the creation of her sculptures and installations. It’s thanks to those working photographs that she secured her first solo gallery exhibition at White Columns in 1988.

The Polaroid has long been used as a tool for practice and process. Juergen Teller’s late-’90s Go-Sees lends some formal weight to the commonplace fashion-industry practice of shooting Polaroids at model castings. David Bailey, likewise, made a habit of snapping Polaroids of his models — everyone from Bianca Jagger to Naomi Campbell to Princess Diana. For Robert Mapplethorpe, shooting Polaroids was instrumental to his creative evolution. Philip-Lorca diCorcia relied on Polaroid to prep works such as Hustlers, using its instant feedback to refine exposure and lighting. The relatively informal Polaroids shot by Mapplethorpe and diCorcia possess a beauty related to but distinct from the fanatically precise work for which both artists are best known.

For some artists, however, the Polaroid was, or is, very much the intended end-product. This is especially true of those who chose to work with the Polaroid 20x24 camera — a hulking, 240-pound marketing stunt turned coveted artistic tool. Only five working cameras were ever built, and artists soon vied for access to one of Polaroid’s 20x24 studios to work with the monumental format. Ellen Carey was among those invited, joining Warhol, Rauschenberg, Peter Beard, and Dawoud Bey in exploring the camera's possibilities.

Carey’s early, exuberantly hand-painted Polaroids built on the tradition Beard had established in the 1960s, embellishing commonplace SX-70 prints with text, ink, and paint. Like Beard, she was invited to the 20x24 studios through Polaroid’s Artist Support Program — and there she found her métier. Between 1983 and ’87, she produced a series of kaleidoscopic self-portraits overlaid with geometric patterns via painstaking multiple exposures, their hypercolor palette a result of variously colored lights. Working in parallel, Dawoud Bey foregrounded the medium as much as Carey did. Having begun his career documenting Black communities in his native New York, he came to see Polaroid’s instant photography as a way of making portraiture more collaborative and egalitarian. “This film allowed me to make an instant print, which I would give to the subject, and also produced a high-quality negative from which larger prints could be made.” When Bey moved into the studio in 1991, he adopted its 20x24-inch format, combining multiple uncropped shots into monumental polyptychs that preserved the white Polaroid border as an integral graphic element.

Bey’s project was — and is — to dignify his subjects. Elsa Dorfman, working with one of the five 20x24 Polaroid cameras in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio, wound up dignifying her vocation as a commercial photographer. Her distinctive commissioned portraits were ubiquitous in the Boston area in the ’80s and ’90s; one of Dorfman’s regular clients was the family of painter Jonas Wood. “We [the kids] all had one on our 18th birthday. My dad went a couple times. My grandfather went a couple times. My sister did one with all of her friends. We did at least three or four family portraits, if not five,” recalled Wood in 2016, apropos the festival release of Errol Morris’s documentary about Dorfman, The B-Side. Over the years, Wood has incorporated Dorfman’s Polaroid portraits into his paintings numerous times.

Other Polaroid practitioners have carried on the Warholian tradition, taking advantage of the instant snap’s diaristic possibilities. Tracey Emin’s Polaroids are pointedly self-revealing. Nobuyoshi Araki occasionally turned his vintage Polaroid lens on himself, but more often he trained it on flowers, toys, skyscapes, and — most (in)famously — the art of kinbaku, with his rope-bound female nudes. In the late 1990s, Araki began taking Polaroids as “an almost daily ritual,” per the organizers of Polaraki, a recent show of 1,000 Araki Polaroids at Paris’s Musée Guimet. Something similar could be said about the 10,000-plus Polaroids shot by Ryan McGinley between 1998 and 2003. Depicting visitors to his East Village apartment — Dash Snow and Dan Colen among them — these Polaroids serve as both memoir and memorial, documenting habitués of a decadent arts scene that was over almost as soon as it had begun. “Capturing a moment” in a larger sense, you might say.  

McGinley and Araki took up the Polaroid just as Polaroid, the company, was going under. The corporation declared bankruptcy in 2001 before passing through several owners. Film became scarce — setting off a mad scramble for the remaining stock. By 2008, manufacture of the original and 20x24-inch instant film ended, prompting photographer and Polaroid super-fan Daido Moriyama to stage an exhibition titled bye-bye polaroid. He expected these Polaroids of the Tokyo streetscape to be his last.

Many thought the story would end there. Wiaczesław Smołokowski came to the rescue, purchasing Polaroid in 2017. Common sense suggested Smołokowski was rowing against the tide — the iPhone was a decade old at that point; Instagram had become widely available five years earlier; the future was digital. Common sense was wrong: Polaroid is having a renaissance. But the revival hasn’t meant turning its back on the digital world. Old technologies have a habit of finding new lives. One relatively recent innovation is the Polaroid Lab printer: scan a photo on your smartphone screen and, presto, you have a Polaroid image in your hands in a matter of moments. The analog keeps reasserting itself, even in an era of digital omnipresence. But new technology doesn’t necessarily entail new ways of seeing, and the impulse to click remains the same — a desire to capture what’s fleeting. It’s only the devices that have changed.