Instant Culture for Sale

When curators of photography dream, what do they see? Maybe this: drawer after drawer of carefully preserved snapshots and outsized prints--Ansel Adams landscapes, David Hockney photo collages, Andy Warhol celebrity portraits, William Wegman Weimaraners--all in the hands of a company eager to sell off its assets.

Those images and more, by photographers from Walker Evans to Robert Mapplethorpe, are all part of the collection that waits in the various vaults of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Polaroid Corp., cash-strapped creator of the instant photograph. The company is still in operation, but it sought bankruptcy protection in October and has been selling itself off in parts ever since.

So far, its photo collection has been untouched in the corporate foraging through Polaroid’s $1.8 billion in assets, and even insiders say it’s almost impossible to predict when the pictures might be sold, or to whom, or for how much. Although many curators and collectors agree that the collection is worth millions, there’s no estimated value on record, nor even a precise count of how many images Polaroid has--the interns who were doing an inventory have been let go to cut costs.

But ask a photo specialist about the Polaroid files, and the answers are quick and eager: The collection, amassed over six decades, is a window on American culture, an invaluable tool for anyone tracking the evolution of photography, and a medley of photography’s biggest names.

“There’s a lot of buzz about it,” said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Ollman said he heard the Polaroid collection mentioned often at a November conference he hosted of photography curators from museums worldwide.

For any of those institutions, the Polaroid pictures “would be more than just an addition. It would be an avalanche of new and wonderful material. If you really want to look at the second half of the 20th century, a huge number of the greatest producers are represented.” Ollman said.

“We think we have somewhere in the vicinity of 24,000 photos,” said Barbara Hitchcock, director of cultural affairs for Polaroid in Waltham, Mass. “We don’t have a complete handle on it, because we don’t have everything in one database.” In some cases, Hitchcock said, “we’re physically walking through offices and looking” to verify which images are in storage and which are on loan to executives.

For anyone who has watched an insurance man fish an instant camera out of his claims-adjusting toolkit, or stood among the millions of drivers who are snapped annually in DMV offices via Polaroid’s identity systems division, it may be a stretch to think of a Polaroid picture as fine art. But in museum corridors across the land, it’s no stretch at all.

“I don’t think there’s another corporation collection [of photography] that even comes close,” said Trudy Wilner Stack, curator of exhibits and collections at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.

Polaroid’s greatest selling point has always been instant gratification. Dr. Edwin Land, the Harvard dropout inventor who founded the company, said the idea for an instant-image camera came to him on a 1944 family trip to New Mexico, when his daughter asked why she couldn’t see an immediate result after he snapped a photo.

Four years later, Land brought the first instant camera to market, relying on a process in which dye colors passed from a negative to a positive print, all inside the camera body, within about a minute. With the spontaneity and interaction that allowed, the relationship between photographers and their subjects was forever changed.

Through the decades, the company’s researchers refined the process, devising cameras to deliver color images (which arrived in 1963), pictures in as little as 10 seconds, pictures from negatives as large as 20 by 24 inches. Until 60-minute photo processing and then the digital camera came along, the utility of Polaroid on-the-spot processing was unrivaled.

While Polaroid was earning a reputation in the marketplace as a producer of simple cameras for the masses, the company’s leaders took pains to forge a connection with fine artists. For decades, Polaroid has sought out promising artists, then traded access to equipment for feedback and prints.

The first such bargain was struck between Land and Ansel Adams, who in 1948 began serving as a Polaroid consultant, testing new films and equipment.

In fact, some of the Polaroid collection’s greatest attractions are filed under A: more than 500 Adams prints, along with more than 5,000 pages of letters and memos from Adams to the company’s scientists and executives.

From Nov. 13, 1951: “Have you considered the tremendous effect your new high speed film may have on astronomical photography? Especially in rendering surface details of the planets.... And a whole new world opens up with the possibility of photographing, under low-light conditions, individuals, groups, meetings, theater, opera, etc.”

From March 28, 1954: “THE WORLD NEEDS A GOOD $50 SHUTTER!”

From Dec. 4, 1972: “It was really exciting to work with the SX-70 and I am tremendously impressed....The camera itself is a rather miraculous instrument.”

Land made such an impression on Adams that the photographer devoted a chapter of his autobiography to the inventor and entrepreneur. Land, wrote Adams, “felt that with the Polaroid process, ‘Everyone can be an artist.’ I had a friendly disagreement with him about the definition of artist, but I knew what he intended by that statement.”

Adams (who died in 1984, after more than 35 years of correspondence with the company) was soon followed by a parade of photography luminaries and luminaries-to-be. Imogen Cunningham, Paul Caponigro, Robert Frank, Olivia Parker, Lucas Samaras, Joyce Tenneson, Jerry Uelsmann and Minor White all contributed to the collection, and in the 1960s the company recruited star European photographers including David Bailey, Sarah Moon, Helmut Newton and Josef Sudek.

Polaroid’s U.S. and international collections, merged in 1990, bring together works from more than 1,000 photographers. Typically, the artists contributed prints to the company but retained their copyrights.

The company’s peak year may have been 1978. That’s when its work force (now less than 7,000 and dwindling daily) topped out at more than 20,000. The same year, Polaroid unveiled a program to give artists access to a new 20-by-24 camera, a 235-pound mechanical marvel that yields up to 20-by-24-inch contact prints--works of “saturated color and frightening sharpness,” in the words of Polaroid’s longtime studio director, John Reuter.

Just six Polaroid 20-by-24 cameras exist, in studios in Boston, Cambridge, New York, San Francisco and Prague. Beginning in 1979, Wegman used one to make portraits of his Weimaraners, Man Ray and Fay Ray, in absurd poses. Artists Mapplethorpe, Chuck Close, Dawoud Bey, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Annie Leibovitz, and Robert Rauschenberg were among those who followed. Adams used the big camera to make a portrait of then-President Jimmy Carter (who almost ruined the session by spending so much time marveling at the camera’s workings), and Andy Warhol did a series of self-portraits.

But like Adams, Warhol was also taken with the possibilities of the high-quality but still fast and portable Polaroid SX-70 camera. So were Walker Evans, near the end of his celebrated career in photography, and David Hockney, near the beginning of his.

In the early 1970s, Evans, known for decades for his work in black-and-white, took to grabbing color images with an SX-70, telling friends, “You photograph things you wouldn’t think of photographing before.” (One such image, of a dead-end sign made less than a year before Evans’ death, is now part of the photography collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood.)

By 1981, Hockney was already famous for his drawings and paintings. But that year, the artist has said, he “started to play with the Polaroid camera and began making collages. This intrigued me and I became obsessed with it.”

Eventually, his collage work grew into a photo-cubism foray that was covered extensively in a 2001 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (In later collages, Hockney switched from Polaroid images, which have white borders, to traditional print film, which doesn’t.)

Warhol’s use of Polaroid’s product, however, may have been more freewheeling than any other of the company’s big-name collaborators.

Warhol not only made Polaroid snapshots as studies for larger silk-screen portraits in the 1970s, the artist said he often stationed himself at the entrance to his Manhattan studio and asked male visitors to drop their pants.

“No matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his [genitals],” Warhol wrote in a memoir. “It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t.”

The Warhol images in Polaroid’s collection, Hitchcock said, are more conventional self-portraits and G-rated snaps of celebrities such as Ted Kennedy, Farrah Fawcett, Sylvester Stallone and Bianca Jagger.

Right now, most of the works are stored in Polaroid’s Waltham offices, Hitchcock said. But the company displays some works at Polaroid facilities around the U.S. and houses others at La Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris and Le Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through the years, a few thousand images have been displayed through Polaroid’s exhibition program, which still has shows on the road.

“Innovation/Imagination: 50 Years of Polaroid Photography” (assembled to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary in 1998) opens Jan. 15 at the University of New Mexico Art Gallery in Albuquerque. “American Perspectives: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection” spent most of 2001 in Japan before returning to the U.S. in September. Another exhibition, an 84-image Ansel Adams show, finished a two-month run in Quito, Ecuador, in November.

“Polaroid color is intense, slightly unreal, adding its own sheen to an image,” art critic Jonathan Jones of London’s Guardian has written.

“This appealed to artists because it made explicit the artifice of the photograph. The popularization of Polaroid in the 1970s coincided with conceptual art and its rebellion against fine media. Conceptual artists liked photographs that were as unartistic, unpretentious and close to the ordinary snapshot (or even photo-booth portrait) as possible. They adored Polaroid.”

The next step in this story depends largely on Polaroid’s tortured finances.

Although analysts say Polaroid has been troubled for years, it remained a formidable marketplace name long after Land stepped down as chief executive in 1980 and died in 1991. In fact, the company’s annual report for 2000 showed sales of $1.85 billion, including 13.1 million instant cameras. That, spokesman Skip Colcord said, is more instant cameras that in any year of its history.

But the company’s debts have mounted during the last two decades, and as digital photo technology appeared on the scene in the 1990s, analysts said, Polaroid was slow to respond.

When the company’s officers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization protection Oct. 12, they cited $950 million in debts and a steep decline in 2001 revenues, and said they believed their best option was the sale of “all or parts of the company.” Since then, they’ve been laying off workers, peddling real estate holdings, curtailing health and life insurance benefits to pensioners, and shedding possessions that Polaroid Chairman and Chief Executive Gary T. DiCamillo says “are not part of our core instant imaging business.”

On Dec. 3, DiCamillo announced a deal to sell the company’s profitable driver’s license photo division to Oregon-based Digimarc for $56.5 million. On Dec. 19, he disclosed plans for a $4.8-million sale of the Polaroid subsidiary that specializes in digital imaging technology for real estate and insurance inspectors. Both transactions are subject to approval from courts and other regulatory agencies.

Spokesman Colcord said the Polaroid art collection “is not among our priorities” for rapid sale, but it is on the table. The images stand out as a handsome asset that could be separated from the rest of the company with relative ease, and it’s not uncommon for troubled enterprises to clear debts, or signal a change in strategy, by selling off art.

In fact, with the centennial of Adams’ birth approaching Feb. 20 and a retrospective of his work touring North America and Europe (its opening run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ends next Sunday; it is scheduled to reach the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Feb. 2, 2003), Polaroid isn’t the only organization pondering an emergency sale of his work.

After a financial crisis forced the October closure of the Friends of Photography, a San Francisco group founded by Adams and friends in 1967, the group’s officials said they hoped to retire the organization’s $1.2 million in debts by selling off 138 prints made by Adams in the 1970s. (The collection’s assessed value is $1.5 million to $2 million, officials said, and a sale to a single buyer is expected early this year.)

Far higher prices have been paid for some corporate art collections. About a week after MGM Grand Inc. bought Mirage Resorts from Las Vegas mogul Stephen Wynn in May 2000, the new owner sold off 11 artworks from Mirage’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, raising $124 million. In November 1998, Reader’s Digest raised $94.5 million by auctioning off 37 Impressionist, Modernist and contemporary works from its 8,000-piece art collection, which is considered to rank among the world’s leading corporate collections.

Currently, the collapse of Enron, the energy and trading company headquartered in Houston, puts into play a fledgling corporate collection that is worth about $2 million.

As for the Polaroid collection’s worth, there are only hints. Before it began its recently concluded tour of Japanese museums, the company’s 162-image “American Perspectives” show was appraised by insurers at about $778,000, Hitchcock said. She added that Polaroid “would like to keep the collections together because of their historical value.”

But if the principal objective is bringing in money, outsiders say, it might be tempting to break up the collection into representative chunks. That way individual collectors might be more inclined to join museums in vying for the pictures. But nothing seems certain.

“When I think about the fixed assets and how [Polaroid’s] founder accumulated all of these long-term assets [from art to real estate], I can’t imagine that they would just sell all the art. I imagine that they would try to hold on to the most valuable pieces,” said Chedly Milord, a New York-based analyst at the Fitch bond-rating agency. That way, Milord said, the core of the company and the core of its visual archive would end up under the same new ownership, whomever that might be.

No matter who ends up with the pictures, preserving them will be a big job. Because of their chemistry, Polaroid images often require more care than the black-and-white prints that dominate many photo collections. To last without their colors fading or emulsions cracking, they may require dry and dark storage at or below 60 degrees.

“There are a lot of unknowns over how the prints are going to endure over the long term,” said Wilner Stack of the Center for Creative Photography. She is closely watching two of her institution’s Polaroid acquisitions from the mid-1990s as a sort of test case in preservation--a successful one, so far.

Those unknowns, and the breadth of the collection, suggest the most likely bidder would be an institution. “It’s perfectly suited for a museum, because it’s a broad-based collection representative of a certain space in time,” said David Fahey, co-owner of Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles and a photography dealer for 26 years. In fact, Fahey said, “it’s so vast that I wouldn’t know of a private person who would be a client for this. Anybody who’s interested in [nearly] 25,000 images has to be an institution.”

Experts agree that most photography-collecting museums couldn’t afford all of Polaroid’s pictures. As a result, many eyes are on a handful of particularly well-endowed institutions, including the Getty and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Since 1984, the Getty has built one of the leading photography collections in the U.S.: more than 65,000 prints made from the 1830s to the 1940s, along with a relatively small number of more contemporary images. The Getty’s photography curator, Weston Naef, declined to comment for this article.

At the Museum of Fine Arts, which collects 20th century photography and has collaborated with neighboring Polaroid over the decades, a spokeswoman acknowledged that the collection’s fate is “the question of the hour,” but curators there also declined to comment on whether the museum would bid on it.

Meanwhile, as the Guardian’s Jones noted soon after Polaroid’s bankruptcy announcement, it’s not just the company’s art collection that people will see differently now. There’s also the extended Polaroid archive--that is, those countless, half-forgotten, image-filled boxes and albums that lurk in closets across America and beyond.

No matter what comes next for the company and its collection, Jones wrote, “all those Polaroid pictures taken and treasured, the party photos and baby shots, will now immediately start to look aged, more distant, as if they belonged to another era.” .