Polaroid Project Online:

20x24

Deborah Douglas

This giant camera weighs 240 pounds and its lens can stretch nearly five feet. Needless to say it grabs everyone's attention just as the many large 20 by 24 inch prints on the gallery walls do. The original 20 by 24 was built as a marketing stunt. Everyone knew that Polaroid shareholder meetings were exciting events, the main moments when the company would announce new technologies. Edwin Land normally very introverted was an impresario on stage and he loved putting on a kind of magic show. In 1976, Polaroid was releasing Polacolor film in an eight by 10 format. Not too exciting, but to make that announcement more interesting a couple of weeks before the meeting Land asked if a giant camera could be built to demonstrate the new film. Needless to say this was a hit and soon artists were begging to use it. Polaroid created Special Studios, one a few blocks away from the MIT museum on Aim Street here in Cambridge, one in New York City. There were five finished cameras overall that were used by artists along with this one which was given to Land when he retired from Polaroid in 1982.

Scrapbook

Deborah Douglas

By the Adam scrapbook, next to the 20 x 24. Looking at this scrapbook that was created by Edwin Landon Ansel Adams, right next to the 20 x 24 camera, is a good moment to think about how in the mid 1970s, the relationship between Polaroid and artists began to shift. Before the mid 1970s, artists like Marie Cosindas and Ansel Adams not only suggested ideas for new kinds of film, they were integral to the entire development process. Polaroid was still giving away hundreds of cases of film and cameras to artists, but fewer and fewer were coming into the labs. What was exciting to artists at this moment was the Polaroid art program and the company's increasingly famous art collection. The engineers and scientists were still fascinated by the artist's work and sometimes a little frustrated when they did things that were more than a little unorthodox. But as the company began to struggle financially, it turned away from artists and towards Wall Street.

Ubiquity Case

Deborah Douglas

Polaroid's engineers and scientists worked very hard in the last years of the company. Some projects, like the 680 made for the professional photographers, are still held in high regard. Others like the Captiva and i-Zone system shown here are dismissed. Most look at the story of Polaroid's last year through the lens of business, missing some of the deeper ways that Polaroid was influencing our culture. These products were intended to be ubiquitous. While in its early years, Land regularly expressed his vision that we all had artists and scientists inside of us. Most of the products that the company made started out by being designed for an elite market. These later cameras inverted that equation and aimed directly at the masses. It might not have been a successful formula to restore the company's bottom line in the late 1990s, but when you consider the trillions of images being captured and shared every day on our smartphones, you can easily see the power of Land's original idea.

Introduction from Curator

Deborah Douglas

I'm Debbie Douglas, curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum and one of the curators of the Polaroid project. I thought you might like a little background about the exhibition from the perspective of the person who chose all of the technological artifacts. The Polaroid project started as a series of deep conversations among several curators and historians fascinated by the cultural impact of instant photography. All of us were quite taken with the enduring popular interest in Polaroid. We took note of the deep visitor engagement with recent exhibitions. We were excited by the rise of scholarly investigations about Polaroid's influences on everything from Apple to apartheid.

Naturally, this gave rise to a thousand ambitious ideas. This exhibition, however, focuses on one key thing, the interplay or intersection of art and technology. Edwin Land, Polaroid's founder made an unprecedented decision to make artists its test pilots and chief influencers of Polaroid's corporate strategy during his tenure as CEO. In this exhibition, you will see an intentional juxtaposition of art and artifacts. This is not just an art show and we are not telling a history of Polaroid. Rather by showing both, we aim to reveal the most important moments in this four decade long dialogue among artists, engineers, chemists and entrepreneurs.

Introduction to Gallery

Deborah Douglas

Whether you go right into the Kurtz gallery or left into the Peterson gallery, you will discover that the Polaroid project has hundreds of photographs and artifacts. I love all the cameras and prototypes, which reveal as much creativity as the photographs., My colleagues, William Ewing, and Barbara Hitchcock, along with Rebecca Reuter and Gary van Zante selected the photographs in this exhibition. They went out a list of more than a thousand down to 250. While other museums made further cuts, we vowed to show them all. To do that, we doubled the length of the show and created two installations. The first opened in October 2019, the second in early March 2020. To our great disappointment, the COVID-19 pandemic required us to close down just one week after opening the second show. We cannot replace the experience of being here, but we hope that this online gallery interactive gives you a sense of that second show.

Introduction to Gallery

Deborah Douglas

Love snapping a photo and immediately sharing it with a friend or family member, thanks to advances in digital and communication technologies you no longer have to wait 60 seconds but you are still surely fulfilling Edwin Land's vision of going from seeing to having, with as few technological barriers as possible. Marshall McLuhan made famous the idea the medium is the message. I think you'll agree that there are many different meanings to be found in all of the works on display but the message is clear. The medium of instant photography has a lot to say about our times. We live in an age of instant. I hope this exhibition helps you gain new insights about Polaroid, about photography and about our insatiable desire to have everything right now.

Test Sheet

Deborah Douglas

In this display case is one of the most important artifacts in the whole exhibition. It doesn't look like very much, a big sheet of poster board with lots of small pictures taped in it and various annotations. In the lower left corner of it, you'll see the names of two important people, [Maroy Morris 00:00:22] and Eudoxia Muller. They were two of the most important women to work on the invention of instant photography. And that's what this sheet is all about. We have 273 of them in the MIT Museum's collection. And together they represent the story of the invention of instant photography. Many people focus on the cameras but really, the big invention was the film and it took years of painstaking testing, trying, trying again, shooting pictures. And only a handful of people even knew anything about this project until it was announced to the public in 1947. But one of the few outsiders was the little girl who started it all. On this test sheet, it's the only one in the museum's collection that shows two photos that feature a little girl, one in the arms of her father Edwin Land. And we believe that this is Jennifer, the three year old who asked that famous question, "Daddy, why can't I see the pictures right now?"

Speed Case

Deborah Douglas

This case showcases Polaroid's first cameras and film. On the top shelf, is a row of the famous Model 95s, Polaroids very first commercial camera, and a box of type 40 roll film. Polaroid called it the Model 95 because that's what they plan to sell it for $95. That's about $500 in 2020. The camera was big and heavy. There are two reasons for that. First, is a key fact to remember about all instant film cameras. However big you want the picture. That's how big your camera has to be. Second, was taxes. There was a weird tax law at the time that that meant that professional equipment were differently from consumer goods. A heavy camera was deemed professional and therefore was taxed at a lower rate.

Vectograph

Deborah Douglas

Jennifer Land asked why she couldn't see the photos who father took on their walk right now. But really it is Smith College art history professor Clarence Kennedy's earlier questions about how to make 3D images of sculpture that got Polaroid into the image making business in the first place. Kennedy and Land were good friends. Kennedy's student Terry became Land's wife, and he was very influential in the history of the company. Not only did he coin the name Polaroid, but many of his art history students became top researchers at Polaroid. This vectograph reminds us that even before the invention of instant photography, Land and Polaroid's direction was already being very much influenced by artists and art historians.

SX-70

Deborah Douglas

There are so many things I could tell you about the SX-70. For example, the name. It comes from the original 1943 project code name, S for secret, X for experimental, and well 70 because that's the next number in the sequence. Interestingly, the SX-70 camera is the one that Edwin Land felt most fully realized his vision for instant photography. In this display case, every single artifact represents thousands of technical and scientific problems that had to be solved, from the perfect roller to just the right color molecules. The SX-70 was one of the first consumer products, if not the first, to use a new technology called the integrated circuit. If you look closely, you actually can see the tiny little black square in the shutter mechanism. The SX-70 project was just as secret as the first one, but it involved thousands of people rather than just a dozen. And it cost about $274 million, that's $1.7 billion today. It was in fact, one of the largest corporate R and D expenditures of the time.

Exploded SX-70

Deborah Douglas

I really like to see inside things. This display of an exploded SX70 camera shows all the parts from the famous red shutter button and leather trim, to the complicated mechanism that flipped a mirror system up and down. The engineering and fabrication of this camera is sheer genius. We think smartphones are miracles, but consider the creative effort it took to put this electromechanical wonder in your pocket. I believe that engineers are artists, and this display really demonstrates that for me.

Newsletter

Deborah Douglas

Usually, displays of books and documents don't attract much attention in museums, but here's one to look at. This is a big spread in the Polaroid company newsletter announcing the debut of the SX-70 camera and film. Not surprisingly, this was viewed as a triumph. It was. And many outside observers then and now have said so. What interests me, however, is the article announcing that Kodak plans to market its own self-developing film. Not many people know about the symbiotic relationship between Kodak and Polaroid. Polaroid was in fact, one of Kodak's largest customers. For years, making Polaroid's negative film. A big goal for the SX-70 project was to eliminate that dependence. And, at the very same time, Kodak had decided that instant film was more than just a tiny niche market, and that it wanted to put Polaroid out of business, or at least claim a big share of this market. This was the start of a spectacular research and marketing battle that culminated with Polaroid suing Kodak for patent infringement. What interests me, however, is that this new preoccupation with patents and lawsuit meant that Polaroid wasn't spending as much time listening to artists.

Ansel Adams

Barbara Hitchcock

In this gallery, I'd like to point out two very early Polaroid photographs that were taken by Ansel Adams in 1955 and 1956. One of them is Half Dome, and that was taken with one of the very early roll films, and it has this delightful little deckled edge around it. You can see from that marker that it is very, very old, while next to it is hanging a picture that Ansel took of the cascades, and it's a year later and now it's a piece of sheet film that has been manually cut. You can see how uneven that is, and it is another marker of the age of these particular photographs. And, black and white photographs taken by Ansell Adams, and then other artists who were doing documentary-like straight photography, were really the building blocks of what became the Polaroid collection.

Ansel Adams and Dr. Land

Barbara Hitchcock

Ansel Adams was a landscape photographer in San Francisco, and he was introduced by Clarence Kennedy to Dr. Land. And Dr. Land was very impressed with Ansel and the work that he was doing. And within a year, in 1949, he had hired him as a consultant to take all of the films that were being explored in the laboratory and take them out into the field and test them. And Ansel started in 1949, and he remained working for Polaroid. And Dr. Land and he became very, very close buddies, used to go photographing together, and this continued until the 1980s, when Ansel Adams passed away.

Peter Beard

Barbara Hitchcock

These two photographs were taken by Peter Beard, who was a New York personality, really. Unfortunately, he recently died. He did straight photography, but he then went a step further. He was photographing often in Africa, and he would photograph animals. And then he came back to photograph Mick Jagger and a gentleman who was incarcerated in a prison in San Francisco, I believe. He took the margins of all these straight photographs and hand-painted all of them. Sometimes he actually did this with more than paint. He would cut his fingers and rub blood on his photographs. This is what you call really wild and crazy, but some photographers that's what they wanted to do. This was self-expression. You took something that was very, very basic, and very simple, and you transport it into another dimension, and that's what Peter Beard was doing.

Peter Beard

Barbara Hitchcock

This work, these two pictures were done in 1972. So it was really a precursor to the seventies and eighties experimentation that just took off like wildfire. And Peter Beard, I gave him an opportunity to work in the 20 X 24 Studio in New York. And what he chose to do was to photograph models, who of course he knew, like Iman and they were wild and crazy photographs. And apparently the studio was wild and crazy and people would come into the studio just to see all these high fashion models that you'd see on the covers of Vogue. Who's Peter Beard? Oh, he's with that woman. No, he was with Iman. So there was that kind of craziness. These photographs taken around 1972, be very similar and familiar, I think in a way, if you take a look at the photograph that was taken by Robert Rauschenberg in 1989.

Eric Blau

Barbara Hitchcock

Another alternative process, which is done by Eric Blau, who, as I recall, is a California photographer and a physician by trade. He did a series of these very elegant photographs with a model, which are [inaudible 00:00:16], and [inaudible 00:00:19] is something that I was much less aware of, but it's a kind of resin-plasticized paper, as opposed to the quality that we come to expect in seeing watercolor papers, or beautiful Japanese rice papers, as the recipient of different kinds of transfers in photographs. I thought this quite a beautiful, striking photograph. [inaudible 00:00:42], "Crucifixion. 1991," was a nice addition to how photographers are looking at different ways of presenting their photographs, what they see in their imagination, or how they want to realize something that's going to be more personal for themselves, and different than the norm.

Anna and Bernhard Blume

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph is by Anna and Bernhard Blume. They are a German husband and wife team, and they photograph primarily only within their own home. And in this particular photograph... It's actually more than one photograph, it's two photographs, that have been taken there by 3-1/4, 4-1/4 Polacolor photographs, so they're fairly small. And they did a series of pictures in which they would take forks and spoons and distort their face in various ways. Put them in their mouths or up their nose, or, I mean, just totally nuts kinds of stuff. And then they would spread them out on a table and they would decide what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to cut away and what they were going to match it up with. And then of course there was no intention to ever really match anything that made any sense, but that would have had some kind of geometry to it. So this is kind of a crazy one. It's maybe a little bit tamer than some of them I've seen, but I just wanted to show that this was one of the things that people were doing fairly early on with Polaroid materials, cutting, pasting, stapling, sewing, inking, painting over them, stuff like that. And that indeed lent itself well in terms of concept of manipulation to what Lucas Samaras did when the SX-70 was introduced in 1972 with that product. And I believe there is a photograph of Mr. Samaras' to the right in the gallery.

Bill Burke

Barbara Hitchcock

Bill Burke, who is a Boston photographer and teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts or has been a teacher there, is a photographer who has spent a lot of time in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. And he went there well after the wars that were taking place at the time, and is really doing a kind of straight photography, photojournalistic kind of photograph with a big cumbersome camera. But it has that feel of the reality in the moment. And then what he does is he takes his pictures, and he has a positive and a negative that he does not pull apart right away to process it, he instead puts it in his pocket or a jacket or a bag, and carries it around with him for the remainder of the day. And then when he goes back to his motel, that's when he takes all these photographs that he's taken out of their temporary pouch and begins to process them by peeling the negative off the positive, after going through the camera and through the roller system, and you will then find scratches and gouges and incomplete coverage and all kinds of things that happen because it was not immediately torn apart after processing on location. So as a consequence, you get this very gritty feeling of his environment, which really kind of takes you into it, I think, more than just a photograph of people at home or carrying guns or out there with their elephants or things like that. It really makes it much more atmospheric and gives you a sense of place, I think. And so this idea of a Polaroid is not really a good vehicle for making a photojournalistic kinds of photographs, well, I guess it depends on the kind of photo journalism that you're dealing with. Here, you're also getting a sense of the feel and of the grit of the place that maybe you wouldn't have in a straight photograph.

Chuck Close

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph is a self portrait by Chuck Close that was taken in, as you can see in 2015, as it says in the margin. Chuck Close is a very important painter in this country, internationally known and he is also a photographer and he's done a lot of work with primarily Polaroid 20 by 24 photographs. This is again, this huge camera that produces in roll film format large, large photographs, and there is no negative that is reusable so this is not an enlargement from a negative. The negative is thrown away, the positive is kept because all of the polar color negatives were not reusable. In this case, Chuck is doing a picture of his face and he's basically famous for taking photographs of people that he knows, their faces. What he does is he draws, in ink, a grid on the surface of the print so that you have a grid that he will then use to create his paintings. That in some cases are the size of a wall 20 by 24 feet, or whatever, enormous, enormous paintings on canvas. So in a way these photographs, although many of them are standalone photographs, are really kind of his way of making an instructive negative on how to make a realistic painting of himself or whoever the subject of his photograph is.

On Curating

Barbara Hitchcock

Bill Ewing talked to me about developing this exhibition. We knew that we wanted to look at the Polaroid collection but we really wanted to go much further beyond that and so they put in ARTnews, the clarion call, that they were looking for artists who were working with Polaroid materials. We were going to develop an exhibition and perhaps a book and if they would submit scans of some of their work, we would love to save them. So that was an opportunity for anybody to actually submit samples of their work electronically and then we had an opportunity to see work that we otherwise never would have. But we also went to studios, we talked to various museums and galleries and artists themselves and as a consequence, Oh my gosh, we had so many photographs that were sent to us as scans. We had, when we first started a list of like a thousand photographers whose work we would love to see in this exhibition, but like walking through the gallery today, we can only talk about a few of the many photographs that are on the wall and reluctantly, we're unable to talk about each artist's work and highlight them all but hopefully the works that we have talked about will give you an idea of what a wonderful collection of work has been created with the various Polaroid films from the 1950s, really until today.

Digital Display

Barbara Hitchcock

When walking through this exhibition, you will find a digital display of local artists works. We would love to have had them all on the wall showing you these pieces, but this will be a display that you can go from one artist to the other and see examples of their work. And you'll also be able to read about the reasons why they are making this work or something that it gives you insight into the photographs that are on the wall.

Harold Edgerton

Barbara Hitchcock

Doc Edgerton was a pal of Dr. Land and Dr. Land would run out of his working laboratory up the street to MIT, to Doc Edgerton's studio and where he was working on the strobe. And Dr. Land brought various Polaroid films. And one of them, which is shown here has a reusable negative. So the initial photographs only had a negative that you could throw away after the positive had been fully developed. In this case, you're seeing the negative and the positive and Ansel Adams in a way was very much responsible for this idea of having a reusable negative and having a really good black and white film. Because he said, "If you don't do that, you'll never attract professional photographers to use your film. And I don't think you want to do that." So here's a good example of a positive and a negative taken by Doc Edgerton who invented the strobe at MIT.

Federico Fellini

Barbara Hitchcock

These photographs were attributed to Federico Fellini. And I just wanted to point them out as one of the things that we were attempting to achieve is showing different ways Polaroid films were being used. Although these look very much like art photography of today, what they were actually doing, were making continuity shots for the film Amarcord. This was 1972. But then they didn't fix them right away. So part of the silver and the print was oxidizing and making these really quite lovely, beautiful, prints that had really no intention of doing that, but were really a workhorse for continuity and filmmaking today.

Paolo Gioli

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph by Paolo Gioli is something that most photographers tried to do and could never achieve, was to make an image transfer, transferring the dyes from the negative to watercolor paper or some other substrate of your choice. It always failed. Somehow, Gioli managed to do these very elegant, dry flowered studies with the ability to make a black-and-white transfer. They reminded me very much of the cyanotypes that Anna Akins made in another century. They're just very elegant, very soft, and quite beautiful. To my knowledge, of course, you're not making any more black-and-white Polaroid films in the corporation as they were before with the same chemistry, that no one else has ever been able to do that. Now, if somebody has, I'd love to hear about it, and I'd love to see them. But, to my knowledge, these are the only black-and-white transfers on Polaroid materials. So they're quite beautiful to look at.

David Hockney

Barbara Hitchcock

Like the photograph of Tom Halloran, the painter of the Beethoven's Death Mask, that's an environmental portrait. And this is the kind of piece David Hockney, who was a wonderful well-known British painter living in California, did with Polaroid SX-70 photographs. He made these assemblages of artists and also of course palm trees and swimming pools, and in this case his assistants. And he was really doing things with Polaroid material that were very much a cubist inspired in these assemblages. And the reason this is, I think, important is what it started to do as a kind of a trigger, make him think about these whole issues of perspective and how painters think about perspective when they are painting. And as a consequence of a huge body of work that Hockney did with Polaroid materials, he immediately, after thinking about all this, jumped to creating these very amorphic, sort of organic assemblages of what he was seeing. Entire rooms that would be certainly not square, but would be very much like amoeba swimming in a pool of water. So it was really a trigger that caused him to rethink about how people see perspective and how painters and photographers portray perspective.

David Hockney

Barbara Hitchcock

I believe that Joyce Neimanas, who was married to Robert Heinecken and a photographer in her own right, was one of the first photographers in which I saw using SX-70, or could be other films, to create grids, to make big rooms, or the entire kitchen, with each little individual photograph. Now, hers were not square grids or oblong grids. They were much more free hand and loose, and she was doing that pre David Hockney. That was the very first time I was seeing that kind of assemblage of small prints being built into big ones of big images. And Hockney, I can't tell you exactly how long he was doing grids with Polaroid, but it was like all of a sudden something fell out of the sky, and he said, "Why am I doing a grid when I can do something that was much more free form?" And that's where he went, and he did huge presentations on his realization of perspective and how we perceive it.

Introduction from Curator

Barbara Hitchcock

Hi, I'm Barbara Hitchcock, and I am the former curator of the Polaroid collection at Polaroid Corporation and Director of Cultural Affairs. I worked at Polaroid for quite a number of years and was fortunate to have worked with Dr. Land and Ansell Adams who was good buddy. As a consequence, I really became very interested in Polaroid fine art photography, as they were great proponents of photography as an art. When I had the opportunity to join a group of ... I don't know what to call us, curators. In 2010 Bill Ewing, of a colleague of mine from Switzerland called and said, "Would you like to do a big Polaroid exhibition?" And I said, "Absolutely. This would be a farewell love letter from my perspective." I joined a group of curators that did art and technology, and we created the exhibition called the Polaroid project at the intersection of art and technology. We hope that in this exhibition, you will see that Polaroid is not just a snapshot photograph. It is also photography that is used in a gazillion different ways by many different artists who are exploring the medium. They are exploring their own ideas. They're not just documenting, but some of them do what's in front of them, but they're also trying to create some work that will be meaningful for them as an artist. I hope that you will, as you walk through these galleries, see the huge variety of films that there are. You will see the wonderful cameras and old roll films and things that were instrumental in bringing a tiny little photograph that is probably three by four to photographs that are 40 by 80 inches wide and long. There's a lot to digest, and hopefully you will have lots of questions and that your curiosity will have been piqued by walking through these galleries and seeing this wonderful display.

Lou Jones

Barbara Hitchcock

At one point, we invited Lou Jones, who was a local photographer that I've known for a gazillion years and he is represented in the digital exhibition in part of the gallery. I hope you'll have a chance to take a look at that work along with other local photographers who are similarly, I have work displayed in this local component of the Polaroid project.

Barbara Kasten

Barbara Hitchcock

Barbara Kasten was a West coast photographer who moved to New York and then onto Chicago. And she in her work, for a long, long time was creating these enormous geometric sets. She was very much into the Russian constructivist movement, and many of these works that she was doing at that time were incredible constructions. And she would go into a studio, and she would create these big objects, lay them out, and then she would use strobe lights to light them all with various gels that were put over each one of these particular lights. And then when she was ready to actually take the picture, in this case, these are eight by 10 color Polaroid photographs, all the lights in the studio were turned off, and she would hit a gel lit for yellow. Then she would do one for red. Then she would do one for another color. And she would sometimes do them multiple times for one particular color in order to build the color that was being recorded on the film until it was the way she wanted it. And as a consequence, when you see these photographs and reality, you can see an amazing amount of saturation of the color in them. And they were just gorgeous specimens of color. And her work evolved from these enormous big sets to creating huge photographs with 20 by 24 camera or bigger that were of pre-Colombian little objects that were maybe three inches high that now looked like they were three feet high with the same kind of blasting of light and color through gels and strokes.

André Kertész

Barbara Hitchcock

André Kertész, he was a Hungarian and he lived in Paris before coming to the United States. He lived in Washington Square and he was a wonderful top photographer in this country. He worked in illustration, worked for big magazines. He was married and his wife passed away and he decided that he needed to do something to express this grief that totally enveloped him. And in 1979, Polaroid gave him an SX 70 camera. And I used to fly to New York from Boston with a case of SX 70 film, to deliver it to Andre at his apartment in Washington Square area. We would sit down and he would tell me about his life and his wife and how these little objects reminded him of her. These were just kind of a loving memorial, a love letter, really to Elizabeth, who he grieved for, for the rest of his life. These were just little objects that he had and put them in his window and would photograph them. Then at the end of the day, we'd sit down and we'd have a glass of Lily Blanc and then I'd head off to the airport. So this is a very personal expression of love from this lovely old gentlemen for the wife that he had lost.

Edward Land and Lucas Samaras

Barbara Hitchcock

Dr. Land was really, really interested in having artists, photographers work with any of the films and cameras, and ancillary objects in the lab, and to push them to their limit in use in the film, because you could learn so much from artists who are viewing things completely differently then the scientists and the engineers who are looking at mathematical paradigms of what a film is supposed to look like when used in various ways; under sunny conditions, under cloudy conditions, heat, cold, whatever. All of that would affect the Polaroid photograph. It was very clear in his mind that it was really, really important to have expert practitioners using Polaroid cameras and film, and giving the information back on their experience to him and to his employees. That was a way they were able to help grow and make better these products that grew from that teeny tiny little deckled edge photograph to photographs that were literally 40 by 80 inches big.

Rebecca Larson

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph by Rebecca Sexton Larson is actually quite a large photograph. It's 47 by 38 inches and it was a pin hole camera that was used to make this photograph and it was done in black and white. And she's used the negative to blow it up into this enormous photograph that has been hand painted. And the reason I wanted to show this to you, this huge piece 47 by 38 is a pinhole photograph and the camera that was used was a laundry box. So we go from the teeny tiny little laundry box camera to the 40 by 80 photograph that was basically a lens in a room that took a Polaroid photograph.

Marshall

Barbara Hitchcock

Another photographic process that was really of interest to many people, because you could do it on glass, or you could do it on paper, you could do it on fabric. And that was cyanotype. And this photographer named Marshall used a three and a quarter, four and a quarter negative and exposed it. And then had this huge piece of watercolor paper on which iron chemicals are brushed on like a painting. And then she used this negative to be exposed by the sun on the paper. And it takes about 10 minutes on a sunny day. It's the UV light that causes the chemistry to take hold of that image and beautiful brush strokes, and the fluidity of that in a very simple photograph of a palm tree.

Hiromitsu Morimoto

Barbara Hitchcock

In going through the galleries, you will see that there are many different ways of using Polaroid materials to create your art, and different people had really different ideas about what they wanted to do. There was this incredible time of experimentation and pushing the films to do things that they never had been doing before. One of the things that was really very much in vogue at one point in the 1980s, 1990s, were antique processes like platinum palladium, and cyanotypes, and other exotic ways of making photographs. This particular photograph is by a Japanese photographer living in New York named Hiro Morimoto. This was taken around 1997, and it's a platinum palladium print. It was made from a Polaroid positive, negative film that was four by five, and it's quite an elegant, very soft, gentle photograph that was taken by him in memory of his spouse, who was very unwell at the time. This was apparently a person that was really, really important to her, and it's a photograph called Peggy's Back.

Sandro Oramas

Barbara Hitchcock

Sandro Oramas, who was a Venezuelan photographer, who lived in United States actually for quite a number of years and is back in Venezuela now, was a proponent of platinum palladium prints. And he loved the beautiful, magical quality, almost dreamlike of the platinum palladium process. So this is a four by five photograph, taken with positive-negative film. And he's treated the paper with the platinum palladium chemistry, and then lay the picture on it and negative does the rest. And it's quite, again, another elegant photograph that takes you into an earlier time, the Victorialist or whatever. It's just gorgeousness, tactile quality of these photographs that you just really want to reach out and touch. We don't recommend that, but of course, it's one of those things that they look like they're made with almost like chalk. So I thought this would be a good example to give you an idea of the various ways photographers are looking to present their photographs.

Robert Rauschenberg

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph by Robert Rauschenberg is a giant, by comparison to the photographs that many Polaroids are. This one is a 20 by 24 inch photograph, and it was taken with a camera that is about four feet high, and 250 pounds, and it gives you a positive and a negative that are 20 by 24. And this photograph was done by Robert Rauschenberg, he had a number of black and white chromes, and he used the 20 by 24 camera to make black and white prints. These prints, he then took home with him to his home in Florida. He put them on the walls of his studio, and he did not coat them with a fixer, so they were subject to oxidation, they were subject to the sun, to the wind, to the rain, as far as I know. And he would look at them daily, and then when he saw something that he wanted to preserve, he would take a paintbrush and he would dip it in the fixer, and he would paint that area of the black and white photograph, and therefore, it stabilized that area and would be painted on. Then he'd say, "Okay, I'd like to see what changes else will happen," and he'd wait, and wait, and wait, and maybe three weeks later, he would say, "Okay, that's what I want to see. That is the picture for me." And he'd paint fixer on the whole thing, make sure he was coating it well, and that whatever was beneath that in terms of silver that was left not oxidized, or partially oxidized, or oxidized away would be preserved. So this was a painter really painting his photograph, and these were then beautifully adhered to aluminum for presentation, and they're very, very, very tactile. They're not covered by glass or Plexi, You could actually, if you put your hand on it, God forbid, you could feel the fixer on the surface of the Polaroid black and white print.

John Reuter

Barbara Hitchcock

This photograph was taken by John Reuter, who was a photographer that came actually and worked at Polaroid, and ultimately he took over the directorship of the 20 x 24 studios. But he was one of those proponents of taking an SX-70 and manipulating it and taking them apart and putting objects in different paint behind them and putting it back together again. Well, he decided he was going to try something new and different by image transfer. What I mean by that is you take a photograph, a color photograph at the time. This one happens to be with an 8 x 10 camera. And you take the negative off, you lay negative then on a piece of watercolor paper and you use a squeegee or roller so that you make a tight seal between the negative that you've just exposed and the piece of paper. And this could be a dry piece of paper, or it could be a wet piece of paper. In fact some people actually put things like this on rocks or on glass or other surfaces. But then you waited a while and as that dye went through the jelly to get to the paper, it would take 10 minutes perhaps before you'd say, "Okay, I'd like to see what we've got." Then you'd tear the negative off the paper and you would have the transfer of all the dyes to the paper, normally would go to the positive sheet of the Polaroid, which would be shiny, et cetera. Now what you have is an image that looks very much like a watercolor. And in this case, John Reuter photographed a live model with that red robe and then he inserted other objects into his photographs that were manipulated and then he painted on the surface as well. So you have a number of things going on in this photograph, which in some ways looks relatively simple, but in fact, took hours of work to actually present what he was seeing in his mind's eye and trying to communicate to the viewer. John Reuter was also a teacher and he was teaching people really, literally all over the world, how to do this kind of photo transfer. And it became very, very, very popular. Of course, people at Polaroid loved it because you don't always get what you want and you do it again. One thing that was very, very difficult, however, was to do the same kind of photo transfer as you see with color, with black and white. And people tried it and tried it and were never very successful until an Italian photographer named [Vaujolie 00:02:52] who was doing image transfer in color, managed to do some really quite exquisitely beautiful black and white transfers. And we can go see that whenever you'd like to see it.

Lucas Samaras

Barbara Hitchcock

This, Lucas Semaras' photograph is one of his earlier ones. The SX-70 camera was introduced in 1972. And this particular photograph was made in 1974. Here you have a photograph in which Semaras takes a picture of his face, and then he uses a stylist to mush around the dyes as they are transferring from the negative to the positive. So, that's how you get your picture. The dye that has been exposed comes forward through the chemistry and deposits itself on the positive sheet. It's sort of like a sandwich, negative peanut butter, and then the other piece of bread. So it's a transfer through all that book to get to that top. So while that's happening, instead of it being a pristine photograph of Lucas's face, he's moved everything so you see his open mouth and his teeth and tongue and everything else is now a muddle of abstract color. And that's one of the things that Lucas Semaras did fairly early on with SX-70s, which of course drove Dr. Land to distraction, because here he'd spent all this time and effort in creating this beautiful camera with this beautiful film. There's nothing to throw away. You only have the photograph itself. And what does he do? He messes it up.

Jan van Steenwijk

Barbara Hitchcock

Dutch photographer, Jan van Steenwijk did a series of portraits of artists, as well as people who are living in various communities or volunteers or whatever. And this particular artist loves to paint Beethoven's death mask. And you can see his paintings, which are quite large in his studio in Waltham, Massachusetts. And part of the deal of being photographed, and as you can see, in black and white and with a Polaroid four by five film, you see on the right-hand side, the trap that catches the material that processes the film. They have to write about themselves and being a painter, Tom Halloran did not want to do that. He wanted to draw something. So he pulled out a piece of canvas and he painted this small death mask of Beethoven. And you can see he's added notes to the painting, and then next to it, it says, "This is not done." So the notes are, "This is not done." And I can't sing, but you get my drift. And then the rest of it is his signature and the date that this was taken.