The Polaroid is photography at its most physical: a single object, developing in the hand, unique and unrepeatable. No negative, no edition, no distance between the moment of taking and the thing held. The Polaroid Gaze gathers works by eleven photographers — Araki, Bourdin, Clergue, Fontana, Gibson, Blair, Haskins, Klein, Newton, Quinn and Warhol — to consider what happens when image-makers of this calibre work within those constraints.
The impulse varies artist to artist. Newton used the Polaroid primarily to prepare for fashion shoots — instant photographs serving as visual sketches, testing light and refining composition. — yet the results carry their own authority and have since become prized objects in their own right. Warhol called his Polaroid Big Shot camera his "pen and pencil" — the initiating step in a practice that moved from instant portrait to silkscreen and back again , blurring the line between study and finished work. For Araki, the medium was something more visceral: instant film less a matter of posterity than a way of being in the moment itselfdesire, tenderness and mortality compressed into a palm-sized square.
What unites these artists is the Polaroid's refusal to accommodate afterthought. The frame is set, the shutter pressed, the image surfaces. Across the wall — which brings together works in a single sustained hang — the cumulative effect is of eleven distinct gazes made visible in their most immediate, least mediated form.
