Getting (Surprisingly) Serious With Polaroids

Most people of a certain age have a sharp memory of the first time they ever saw a Polaroid camera. A rich kid brought one to a high school basketball game and attracted more attention than the local heroes. Or a gadget-happy uncle slipped one out of his pocket at a family Christmas party and impressed the clan by producing an instant record of the occasion.

Even now, 40 years after Edwin H. Land introduced the “instant” camera and 24 years after Polaroid color film came on the market, American tourists offend the Chinese by snapping pictures of their children and then delight them by giving them the likeness that zips out of the camera. Dozens of technological marvels have succeeded the film that automatically functions like a portable darkroom, but the Polaroid still seems a magical gimmick.

Thanks to that perception, the importance of Polaroids to the field of photography hasn’t been fully comprehended. We know about David Hockney’s update of Cubism while “drawing with a camera” in collages of color Polaroid images. We have seen an entire book of Lucas Samaras’ self-portraits, concocted by drawing into and otherwise manipulating the emulsion of film immediately after exposure.

We also have noted the really big pictures that artists have made from a few out-sized Polaroids, including a room-sized camera at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. UCLA’s recent show of Patrick Nagatani’s and Andree Tracey’s photographs, for example, consisted of 20x24-inch prints from one of only 20 cameras in the country capable of producing them.

Though artists may be reluctant to relinquish control of developing their film, they have been intrigued by the Polaroid’s capability of producing pictures in 10 to 20 seconds without the usual graininess of fast film. Setting art aside, any journeyman photographer can tell you that the Polaroid is a handy tool for checking light before shooting a subject with a more conventional camera.

But despite widespread familiarity with Polaroid, the process is still perceived as an adjunct to the central core of serious art photography. Or at least it was until the International Center of Photography opened a show called “Legacy of Light” (to Jan. 10). Organized by Constance Sullivan, the exhibition of 205 photos by 58 American artists fills the center’s stately galleries on upper Fifth Avenue. The $50 hard-cover catalogue contains essays by Peter Schjeldahl, Gretel Ehrlich, Richard Howard, Diane Johnson and Robert Stone.

This is clearly a classy production, but an unwitting observer might mistake it for a survey of photography in general. Only with the realization that all of the works were produced with Polaroids does “Legacy of Light” become special--and surprising. Even seasoned viewers can be forgiven for mumbling, “These don’t look like Polaroids,” while wondering if a few impostors share the limelight with such obviously genuine examples as Samaras’ “Photo-transformations” and collaged portraits by Hockney and Joyce Neimanas.

The pictures are big and small, traditional and experimental, documentary and artistic. Produced in black-and-white and color by mainline photographers and people better known for their paintings, they represent about as many points of view as artists, though they are displayed in traditional categories of subject matter: landscapes, the nude, portraits and still lifes. One can imagine more telling organizational approaches, but this ordinary one serves the purpose of proving that Polaroids are not mere curiosities that play around the edges of photography; they swim in the mainstream.

Who better to prove it than Ansel Adams? His Polaroids of Yosemite, Arizona architecture and a “New England Barn” don’t strike the Wagnerian chords of his larger, trademark images, but they are tendered with the same insistence on perfection. Adams took the Polaroid Land camera seriously. So did Walker Evans, Paul Caponigro, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham and William Clift, other major American photographers whose work historically grounds the exhibition in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

In the landscape section, we find intricately textured images of nature by Caponigro along with crisp, vividly colored reminders of small-town architecture and signs by Evans. Among more recent work, Danny Lyon continues Evans’ fondness for the vernacular--IGA Stores, telephone wires and old brick libraries--in disjointed, black-and-white panoramas of Midwestern streets, spliced together from three or four separate pictures.

Jim Dow’s “landscapes” are actually sumptuous interiors of elegant old theaters, dressed to kill in red velvet curtains, ceiling murals, carved columns and twinkling lights. Mark Klett investigates Southwestern deserts, but instead of producing the usual “majesty” he gives us ragged edges--scruffy cacti, scraggly brush, a camping party and a photographer with her tripod set up on a lonely expanse of the Petrified Forest. Scrawling titles across the bottom of his photographs and resisting the urge to crop or mat the images, Klett presents photographs that have a scrapbook-like veracity and a refreshing lack of pretension.

Other segments of the exhibition have a similar blend of old and new work that generally moves from relatively traditional imagery and composition to more adventurous, sometimes cheekier varieties. Along with White’s and Caponigro’s satiny portraits that seem to probe character with a full range of values, we find intentionally grainy or blurry images by Jim Bengston, Sheila Metzner and Sally Mann among the newer pieces. One of the images in Bengston’s “Slow Motion” series, for example, has a farm boy standing in a hazy ring of pigs--like a candle skirted with a ruffle.

Far from dignified flattery, some contemporary portraits indulge in self-deprecation or mean-spirited exposition. Conceptualist William Wegman lathers his face, then apparently butchers it in a droll diptych called “Foamy, Aftershave.” Andy Warhol pictures himself--close up and cropped--as a stressed-out albino. John Coplans’ subjects appear so wary that he ends up depicting himself (in the imagination) as insufferably intrusive. In the section of nudes, however, Coplans’ own body is a contorted mass of hairy, overweight, out-of-shape components.

Bill Burke and Jim Goldberg probe social issues in portraits that have a distinctly documentary flavor. A muscular, lanky-haired Cambodian soldier is so exotically beautiful, in a photo by Burke, that he puts a glamorous spin on war while pointing out the obscenity of wasting youth on old men’s battles.

Examples from Goldberg’s incisive “Nursing Home Series”--formerly shown at the USC Atelier--combine black-and-white pictures of old people reduced to near-vegetable status with handwritten comments from the subjects or their relatives. In one striking piece, H. E. Beal proclaims his swaddled image “a damn good picture” and keeps up his spirits with admirable bravado by writing about his “rough and wild” earlier days and “the good life” at the nursing home.

A group of school kids touring the exhibition during my visit was predictably embarrassed amid the display of nudes recorded on Polaroid, but there are relatively few pictures that grown-ups will find evocative. The assembly seems more concerned with curiosity about the landscape of the human figure--with its parts artfully cropped, pressed together, tattooed or shadowed.

Among the few artists who take the unclothed figure into a narrative, conceptual or humorous realm is John O’Reilly, who poses his pasty white, nude self as a photographer in re-creations of famous Neo-classical paintings. He’s Ingres with a camera as he faces “La Baigneuse de Valpincon” on a bed. Then he becomes David “Shooting Marat” in a sober send-up of “The Death of Marat.” O’Reilly cleverly casts the photographer as a late arrival on the scene of art history, an owlish voyeur and a stage director who can infuse old chestnuts with fresh meaning.

The still lifes, called “Object and Form,” compose the coolest segment of the show, but they can be as damp and erotic as Chris Enos’ close-ups of flowers or as disturbing as Rosamund Purcell’s photographs of monkey skins whose faces stare out like specters of bestiality. Olivia Parker, an artist who deserves more exposure in Southern California than she has been given, shows still lifes of bright fruit on dark backgrounds that have the brooding presence of Old Master paintings.

The exhibition is not the last word on Polaroids. It certainly could be reworked, expanded and variously presented, say, to illustrate a historical progression, analyze artistic attitudes or compare ways of working. There’s much curatorial work left to do with a medium that is known for producing quick, little unique images but often records laboriously constructed tableaux and--in some Polaroid films--has usable negatives that can print multiple enlargements.

But those are future projects, and “Legacy of Light” can be credited with doing some of the groundwork. In the present show, the message is that Polaroids occupy a much larger and more substantial place in photography than we might have imagined. That probably means that artists’ ingenuity is more elastic than any technological wonder.