The Polaroid Book

 
 
The Polaroid Book
Selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography

edited by Steve Crist

Taschen

2004 

 
The Polaroid Book is a collection of Polaroid photos by professional artists, often from an early point in their career. 
 
The photos were selected from the official Polaroid company archive by Steve Crist, and there's an introduction by Barbara Hitchcock, who works as an archivist at Polaroid. She explains that early on, Polaroid founder Charles land recruited photographer Ansel Adam to help test and experiment with his company's cameras and film. Adams also convinced Land to start collecting art photos. Adams started the archive by recruiting other established professional photographers and buying up a lot of their work with the company's money. Since then Polaroid has grown the collection by recruiting young artists and getting a sample of their work. Some then go on to become well-known. (Crist didn't include any of his own photos, but he did pick a couple of Hitchcock's.) 
 
The photos in the book include examples of probably every size of film Polaroid has ever produced, not just the iconic squares with white frames (although there are plenty of those too). Some artists managed multiple exposure tricks, which I would've thought were impossible, some modified the images afterward, a few even managed to chemically remove the color layer from the rest of the physical photograph and mount it in paper. It's a reminder that photographers need to know mechanics and chemistry as well as like, composition and color theory. Most of the shots are single images, but a few created sets - a pair, a triptych, 3×3 and 4×4 grids. David Hockney made an insane panorama of a single room, overlapping the edges of over a hundred snapshots to recreate the space in large format.
 
Crist picked one or two other names I recognized. There was a photo from Ansel Adams, possibly from that initial research trip to Yosemite. Andy Warhol had two self portraits, and someone else had a shot of him too. There are landscapes, still lifes, artistic nudes, surreal juxtapositions and abstract fragments of image with no context, close-ups like you might expect and long-shots with more detail than I realized the cameras were capable of. Many are in black and white, although Polaroid returns vibrant colors and stark contrast between darks and lights.
 
The contrast between The Polaroid Book and FOUND Polaroids is, unsurprisingly, enormous - it's a contrast between skilled professionals handing over some of their best shots on purpose and a smattering of amateur and mundane photos that were either accidentally lost or intended to be thrown away. This may shock you to hear, but the art photos are much better, and honestly, make for more varied and more interesting viewing.