Revitalising the magic of Polaroid

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From Polaroid to Impossible: Masterpieces of Instant Photography – The WestLicht Collection

Edited by Achim Heine, Rebekka Reuter and Ulrike Willingmann

When the legendary Polaroid Collection was put up for auction at Sotheby’s New York in 2009 artists, museums and collectors joined forces to protest against the sale of this extensive collection of photographs. It included work by Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others. Polaroid had supplied all these artists with film, beginning in the 1960s, and examples of their photographs had subsequently found their way back into the company collection, hence the vast numbers that had built up over the years. With the rise of digital photography and the resulting pressure on seemingly outmoded analogue formats, such as Polaroid, the remaining Polaroid factory was preparing to close in 2008.

With the format set to become obsolete and the company under huge financial pressure, The Impossible Project emerged to ‘revive precisely this analog, material quality of the photograph-in-a-moment and place it in the hands of a new generation’. The Impossible Project may have seemed anachronistic and, true to its name, impossible, but it rescued the old Polaroid factory at Enschede in the Netherlands, developed its own instant film and a new future for the instant analogue format.

But Impossible didn’t stop there. Joining forces with Viennese photography museum WestLicht it was able to buy back the Collection from the Swiss Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, keeping it intact and making it available to museum visitors. Now, in this book, the collection is opened up to a wider audience. From Polaroid to Impossible: Masterpieces of Instant Photography – The WestLicht Collectionpresents us with a selection of instant photography from the original Polaroid collection, along with some new additions from Impossible.

Impossible’s passion for the analogue was never about any nostalgic engagement with the medium. Rather, the aim seems to be to lend it new life and new application amongst the legions of young photographers developing their practice across the world. With artistic teenagers of the digital age increasingly turning to the analogue, the impossible becomes possible and the Polaroid is secured for another generation to enjoy.

This book, with texts in German and English, is not for the serious student of photography but simply for those who love photography and want to know something more about the artist’s engagement with the analogue form. There are three extremely short and accessible essays by Achim Heine, Barbara P. Hitchcock and Florian Kaps, but it is the photographs themselves that are important and fill the majority of its pages. From Lennart Nilsson’s Human Embryo 5mm (1974) to Sally Mann’s Composition III (1985), it does not always make for easy viewing and certainly is not a coffee table book, yet it is the images that insist on telling their own stories.

From Polaroid to Impossible: Masterpieces of Instant Photography – The WestLicht Collection edited by Achim Heine, Rebekka Reuter and Ulrike Willingmann is published byHatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2011. 192 pp., 230 colour illus, £35.00/ € 39.80. ISBN: 978-3-7757-3221-5