Please Please return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge‘s ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge’s Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions.
Please Please return Polaroid explores Aldridge’s dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!
Miles Aldridge, born in London in 1964, has published his photographs in such influential magazines as American and Italian Vogue, Numéro, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. His work has been exhibited in numerous group shows, and his solo shows include those at Brancolini Grimaldi in Florence, Hamiltons Gallery in London, and Steven Kasher Gallery in New York. Aldridge’s work is held in the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in the International Center for Photography in New York.
Miles Aldridge: Please Please return Polaroid
Text by Michael Bracewell
Book design: Miles Aldridge
204 pages, 117 images
11.5 x 11.5 in. / 29.5 x 29.5 cm
Color
Hardback / Clothbound
ISBN 978-3-95829-748-7
US$ 58.00 / € 58.00
https://steidl.de/Books/Please-Please-return-Polaroid-1128325659.html
