ABOUT THE POLAROIDS
In the 1980s, my freelance work included assisting photographers working in Polaroid’s 20x24 Studio. I also used Polaroid materials to explore my own imagery, exchanging prints for film and studio time. This resulted in two distinct studio portfolios. The first, Morning Light, was shot with the natural light from my studio windows and Type 55 PN, a black and white film that produced a 4”x5” negative, enabling traditional silver prints. This evolved into the strobe-lit Jumping Naked series; early images were made in my studio with Type 55 PN before I was able to work with Polaroid’s 20x24 view camera. Images acquired by Polaroid went into their collections, one based in Cambridge and another in Europe. When the corporation filed for bankruptcy, Sotheby’s auctioned off the Cambridge collection, including images by such masters as Ansel Adams, William Wegman, and Andy Warhol; I don’t know what became of my pictures.
Photographs in the Polaroid International Collection were transferred to the WestLicht Museum for Photography in Vienna, Austria, which now holds examples from both of my studio series as well as a handful of SX-70 images. In addition, a 20x24Jumping Naked original, one of the “Hoopla” images, is in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A black and white diptych from the WestLicht collection is part of The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, an exhibit that’s traveled to Fort Worth, Vienna, Berlin, Hambourg, Singapore, Montreal and the MIT Museum in Cambridge.
A selection of original 20x24 Polacolor photographs are available for purchase, publication or exhibition. Other Polaroid images are available in limited edition digital prints.