Rago Auctions

The great invention that is Polaroid—the game changer in photography and science, technology and art—offers me a chance to combine innovation with imagination, echoing Polaroid’s tag line ‘See what develops.’

—Ellen Carey, “Photography Year Zero: Where Art and Technology Meet”

Renowned photographer Ansel Adams allowed very few people to interrupt him while he was in the darkroom; among the chosen was inventor, businessman, and two-time Harvard dropout Edwin Land, co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Adams became best-known for his sublime black-and-white landscape photography, but he occupied a variety of roles throughout his career, including as a deeply influential consultant for Polaroid. Land hired Adams in 1949, and over the decades that followed, Jennifer Quick writes, “Adams leveraged his extensive knowledge of the medium to offer feedback on technical, mechanical, and aesthetic elements of Polaroid films and cameras.” This important partnership between photographer and camera company had profound and lasting impacts not only for Polaroid, but for the history of photography, design, and visual culture writ large.

This important partnership between photographer and camera company had profound and lasting impacts not only for Polaroid, but for the history of photography, design, and visual culture writ large.

The works offered in Photographs from the Polaroid Collection originate directly from Land and Adams’s powerful vision of bridging art and industry: one of Adams’s many lasting contributions to Polaroid was to replicate the very arrangement of his own consultantship. Adams encouraged the company to hire working photographers to test Polaroid cameras and film, becoming an integral part of the development of new photographic technologies. He likely did not have to twist Land’s arm: “Land encouraged exploration and failure,” Quick offers, “and hired employees from many disciplines, not just the sciences, to promote an investigational and interdisciplinary corporate culture. Deeply interested in visual perception, Land hoped that artists, by introducing different perspectives into the research and development process, would challenge Polaroid scientists and engineers.”

Deeply interested in visual perception, Land hoped that artists, by introducing different perspectives into the research and development process, would challenge Polaroid scientists and engineers.

From this ethos and with Adams’s stewardship, Polaroid’s Artist Support Program was born and, in the 1960s, it would be further structured and edified by another of Land’s trusted colleagues, Meroë Marston Morse. Many of the works created through this program would become part of Polaroid’s institutional collection, which at one point included as many as 16,000 images from artists including Adams himself, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, William Wegman, Ellen Carey, and many more, all represented in this auction.

“Many well-known artists have toyed with Polaroid cameras, or even embraced them wholeheartedly,” writes William A. Ewing in his introduction to The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology. “Andy Warhol, Ellen Carey, David Hockney, Joyce Heimanas, William Wegman, and a considerable number of others made sophisticated artworks, of a type made possible only by the particularities of Polaroid cameras and film.” Polaroid’s SX-70, heralded as “one of the most remarkable accomplishments in industrial history” by Fortune, was especially game-changing for the public and artists alike. For Hockney, as just one example, photographs made with the SX-70 formed the basis of his groundbreaking assemblage works (in addition to traditional snapshots), which placed his practice in conversation not only with Cubism, but with the nature of perspective and image-creation itself.

Polaroid was similarly integral to new directions and deepened inquiries for artists like William Wegman and Ellen Carey. For the former, Polaroid enabled a transition from black-and-white to color photography and, eventually, his complete embrace of Polaroid-specific aesthetics into his process has made him one of artists most readily associated with the company. In 1978, Wegman was invited by Polaroid to use their newly released large-format 20-by-24 camera, which produced instant images on a much larger scale than consumer models. As Wegman himself reflected, “This unique camera provoked a radical departure from my previous work, both in concept and look, opening me to aesthetic and expressive adventures I had been up to then careful to avoid.”

Nearly two decades later, in 1996, Ellen Carey also used Polaroid’s 20-by-24 camera to originate vibrant conceptual abstractions that she would dub “Pulls.” “Abstraction and minimalism are largely American movements,” Carey wrote in "Photography Year Zero: Where Art and Technology Meet." “It is another American creation, Polaroid’s 20 x 24-inch format, that provides a link between these breakthroughs in visual thinking and my discovery in 1996 of the “Pull,” an abstract and minimal image that is both Polaroid instant technology and experimental in terms of process.” In Carey’s case, the Artist Support Program quite literally enabled radical new directions in the photographic discipline, carrying forth Polaroid’s legacy of experimentation into a cutting-edge arena of contemporary art production.

Unlike Wegman or Carey, not every artist who was supported by Polaroid took dramatic turns in their creative approach—but they were nonetheless given the resources and encouragement to try new things. The list of artists is formidable, the range of subject matter impressive, spanning María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s explorations of migration and identity, Richard Hamilton’s postmodernist collage prints, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s artist portraiture, Dawoud Bey’s poignant meditations on visibility, power, and race, and much more. Many of the works from the Polaroid Collection were exhibited in the traveling exhibition The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, tracing the outsized impact of Polaroid on popular audiences and artists alike.

Collectively, these works illuminate Polaroid’s remarkable and enduring legacy of experimentation, born from Edwin Land and Ansel Adams's shared belief in the fusion of technological innovation and artistry.

Collectively, these works illuminate Polaroid’s remarkable and enduring legacy of experimentation, born from Edwin Land and Ansel Adams's shared belief in the fusion of technological innovation and artistry. The works featured in Photographs from the Polaroid Collection not only reflect the technical marvels of instant photography, but also the creative ferment that Polaroid uniquely fostered. They stand as vibrant testaments to a moment in history when corporate imagination and artistic ambition aligned to expand the possibilities of visual culture, leaving a legacy that continues to inspire artists and audiences alike.

Sources: 

"Designing Polaroid: Ansel Adams as Consultant," Jennifer Quick, American Art, Spring 2021, Vol. 35, No. 1, University of Chicago Press

"Polaroid’s History Through Two Lenses: One Sanitized, One Playful," Jackson Davidow, Art in America, March 25, 2020

The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, eds. William A. Ewing and Barbara Hitchock, 2017, University of California Press