PRESS RELEASE
Grob Gallery presents The Polaroid Gaze Works by Araki, Bourdin, Clergue, Fontana, Gibson, Blair, Haskins, Klein, Newton, Quinn and Warhol
Grob Gallery is pleased to announce The Polaroid Gaze, an exhibition bringing together Polaroid works by eleven of the twentieth and twenty-first century's most significant photographers. The exhibition takes the form of a single wall presentation — a sustained, cumulative hang that allows the intimacy of the medium to assert itself at scale. The Polaroid process revolutionised photography by offering something no other medium could: the immediate materialisation of an image as a unique, unrepeatable print. This quality — at once technological and almost haptic — attracted artists whose practices were otherwise very different from one another. Newton and Bourdin, whose work defined the visual language of high fashion photography across the 1970s and 1980s, both turned to the Polaroid as a tool of rapid formal invention: a means of fixing light, testing staging, pushing compositions at speed. For Warhol, the Polaroid became inseparable from his commissioned portrait practice — the initiating gesture in a process that moved through the camera to the silkscreen, the instant image serving as both sketch and social act. Araki, meanwhile, brought to the medium a characteristic sense of intimacy and proximity, addressing — across series spanning decades — the same preoccupations of Eros, mortality and the body that run throughout his wider practice. Across the eleven photographers represented, The Polaroid Gaze traces a shared investment in immediacy: in the photograph that cannot be revised, retouched or re-edited after the fact. The wall format — one of the exhibition's defining decisions — allows individual works to read both as singular objects and as part of a collective visual field, the individual gaze absorbed into something larger.
Lucien Clergue, a close associate of Picasso and a founding figure of the Rencontres d'Arles, brings a Mediterranean sensibility and a deep interest in the body and the natural world. Ralph Gibson, Sam Haskins, William Klein and the other artists represented extend the exhibition's range across documentary, fashion, portraiture and fine art photography — mapping the Polaroid's reach across the photographic culture of the late twentieth century.
The Polaroid Gaze is presented by Grob Gallery as part of its ongoing programme of exhibitions exploring photography as both medium and object.
