The photographer Walker Evans once called it a "damned thing" that "reduces everything to your brains and taste." The Polaroid instant camera had a simple and ubiquitous role, one that can be summed up by the offspring of its inventor who once asked her father Edwin H. Land, "Why can't I see them now?"
By the 1960s, not only did half of America have an instant camera in their house, but police officers, fire investigators, and photographers utilized the practicality of Polaroid, its instant ability to recreate and preserve a live scene.
At the onset of a cultural revolution that rested in the hands of experimental artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Polaroid couldn't have come at a more useful time. From Andy Warhol's soup cans to the Dada-style collage work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it was clear that something ordinary was becoming extraordinary.
Fashionable was the artist of this era who took the every day low-brow world and sculpted it, colored it, or cut it up into a new inflated aesthetic influence. It wasn't long before some of the most inventive artists in history distinguished this ordinary instant camera from other objects with their own projects, including Warhol, William Wegman, Chuck Close, and Ansel Adams. The result was a body of work from all of these artists that Polaroid founder, Edwin H. Land turned into one of the most important photographic collections in history.
"It should be hanging in a museum", said Sumner Hatch, a New-York based artist and photographer.
Instead, Polaroid's collection will be auctioned away.
The New York Times reported today that "On offer will be 400 photographs by Ansel Adams alone, along with prints by Mr. Close, Mr. Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol and Lucas Samaras. Together the 1,200 objects are expected to fetch $7.5 million to $11.5 million."
Polaroid's ample collection resulted from their unique business approach back in the 1950s when they would lend out equipment and darkroom time to the photographers in exchange for their prints.
But the 70-year old company took a devastating hit first in 2001 and then in 2008, both times from the digital age and then a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.
Because the company must pay off its creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota--where the Ponzi scheme took place--is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection. The sale will take place at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22.
According to Bloomberg news, "The two-day auction is likely to rank among the biggest sales of corporate photography collections liquidated by a bankrupt company. Futures trader Refco Inc. holds the record of $9.7 million fetched for its photography collection sold at Christie's in 2006."
In a New York Times interview on the collection, Chuck Close responded: "to sell it is criminal."
Sotheby’s will put the photographs on public view for six days before the auction at its York Avenue home, marking the first and last time the collection will be seen together.
On the sale of Polaroid's collection, Mr. Hatch said, "to think, it will be in the hands of some JP Morgan executive's wife who thinks shes starting an art collection."
Polaroid claims it tried to contact museums--such as the Fogg at Harvard--about taking in their collection, but were unsuccessful in reaching a deal.
"It's not about the collection itself," Mr. Hatch said. "It's that the medium represented in the collection will no longer exist."
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