Polaroid recently announced that it would discontinue instant-film production. Even with local film processing shops closing left and right, I was still surprised and not a little nostalgic by this, ahem, development.
Like the Gocco, which was discontinued then revived through grassroots effort, I think the polaroid still has broad appeal to the DIY set. It’s a medium, like photography itself, that caters equally to the mundane as to fine art, and even in between. Call me naive but I believe somewhere in the mechanical-chemical processes involved in exposing and developing film there are mystical forces at work. Particles of life are captured, float mysteriously onto the film and are reorganized in some verisimilitude of the subject. The photograph for me is never as my eyes saw it, but how the film rendered it. As Garry Winogrand said, “what is photographed is changed by being photographed.”
Digital formats just don’t seem to have the same life. I wonder if we’re not losing something to the instantaneous high-bit capture and cataloging of the visual world - like the patrons stepping from Van Gogh to Matisse at the Musee d’Orsay and staring into the LCD’s of their cameras without actually appreciating the art in front of them. There’s transcendence and mystery in emulsion. I look at the work of master photographers and I can sense it.
Many moons ago a friend loaned me a hardcover copy of Phillippe Halsman’s Jump Book. The pictures sparkled with life, demonstrating an ingenious portrait technique that illuminated the character of each individual in ways that traditional portraiture could not. In the accompanying text, Halsman playfully introduces his science of “jumpology”, which analyzes airborne physical expression like a psychologist analyzes behavior. The series of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is one of my favorite pieces ever.
Halsmann’s brand of whimsy is also a principal force in the work of Lee Friedlander, whose retrospective is showing now at the SFMoMA. Though I’m pretty familiar with his work, I was still struck by the stunning composition of even his most improvised street shots. There’s a lot of life inside the frame.
As a weird aside to all this, the life of Philippe Halsmann recently found its way onto the big screen. Jump! explores a sensational murder trial during Halsmann’s youth and features the theatrical stylings of Patrick Swayze!
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