Since its beginnings, the Polaroid has served to capture one’s most intimate moments. Present during important and informal family gatherings, during travels or at home, the compact Polaroid image became in a way the symbol of the recorded moment.
A fragment of life, a fragment of emotion, of which the photographer captures the essence of the immediate. Shared moments later, when the image is revealed after being nursed in the hollow of an underarm or against ones’ breast pocket, held there to encourage the chemical process, even when coming into being, the Polaroid picture becomes an intimate part of those who use it.
Candid impressions, the images are often slightly offset, made in a spontaneous gesture. The moment seized in the present becomes already a past memory that will join the accumulation of episodes often as anonymous as anecdotal.
In a world of pixels, it alone represents a nostalgia for another era. The memories become tangible. They express the connection of man to his time and one’s way of life rooted in the “organic” memory. Unique object, unique souvenir. Polaroid has understood that if the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction offers advantages, its particularity is its precise singularity, itself fundamentally linked to this unique moment.
An exhibition at Galerie &co119, in Paris, brings together five contemporary artists, each of whom used the Polaroid as a way of revealing the « exceptional » of what makes intimacy in all that it comprises: the ordinary and the banal. The private initially reserved for the intimate circle who participated in its creation, physically passed from hand to hand, over time becomes an object that is submitted to the gaze of a wider public. The Polaroid, photo object, in all its immediate imperfection, thus comes to sublimate what was simply anecdotic and allows others not only to witness but also become accomplice to what may have started as a singular moment of staged intimacy. Playful, questioning and provoking our idea of what ordinary intimacy may mean, the images of Nobuyoshi Araki, Tokyo Rumando, Alex Marillat, Jeremy Stigter and Tom Bianchi presented here form an engaging and poetic dialogue.
Polaroid, récits de l’intime
March 16 to May 12, 2018
Galerie &co119
119 rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
France
