A Rare Large-Format Polaroid Exhibition, and Photographic Ideas That (Perhaps) Never Go Out of Style

The medium has changed, but good work is still good work — and instant photography still has life in it.

From September 8, the exhibition Instant: Julian Schnabel runs in Shanghai: photographs shot on an extra-large-format Polaroid bellows camera by the artist and director Julian Schnabel. The show presents four series, 32 original Polaroid prints in all.

Polaroid is a famous camera brand, and a busy one in the 1970s, but the wave of camera digitization pushed it toward bankruptcy, and parts of its business were sold off and broken up.

This is an instant-imaging technology, and in the age of digital photography a group of people still use it. As Peter Coeln of OstLicht Gallery put it in an interview, "Polaroid, as a distinctive medium, strikes something new in young people — or perhaps something old." In an age of digitized images, instant imaging is still a way of living that young people choose, and in certain moments it does something a phone or a digital camera cannot. An instant photo brings people closer and carries the spirit of sharing on the spot; it is also a record.

The master photographer Zack Arias once said Polaroid is a social tool: shoot it, see it, and people warm to each other. All it takes is a few minutes of easy banter with the photographer, or even some strained small talk, and the picture just taken appears in front of you.

Polaroid had already left the instant-film market by 2008, and to pay down its debts it had to sell most of its collection — among those works, a self-portrait by Andy Warhol set an auction record for a Polaroid photograph, going for US$254,500. How deeply people would feel about an "obsolete" technology may be something the company itself never expected.

Julian Schnabel, who made the work in this show, is an American artist and filmmaker, born in New York in 1951. As an artist, he drew international attention with his famous "plate paintings." As a filmmaker, his The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) took four nominations at the 80th Academy Awards. At this year's Venice Film Festival his new film, At Eternity's Gate, made the main competition, and Willem Dafoe won the festival's Volpi Cup for Best Actor for it.

What makes the exhibition unusual is that all 32 pictures were shot on an extremely rare 20 x 24-inch Polaroid bellows camera, and each print measures 88 x 56 cm. Only six of these cameras are still in working order.

A Polaroid this big is normally used in the studio: it takes two people to operate and it makes stricter demands on light. Schnabel chose to shoot outside the studio, and often. At his Vienna exhibition he said: "When I used that camera, I found that light would leak in. So I started shooting with it in natural light, or outdoors."

Unlike ordinary photography, Polaroid develops on the spot, which is why it is called instant photography. "Instant" is not only a very short moment; it also points to the present, or to nearness — nearness to the instant the shutter is pressed. The developing chemicals sit on the surface of the print, and over the several hundred seconds of exposure the image slowly comes up. Schnabel said, "What comes out has movement in it, like a liquid. It is a liquid," and "this material is in some ways very much like painting, so it has many dimensions, it has a strong physicality. It's not just standing someone in front of the camera and shooting; it's making a photograph like this, and that's when interesting things happen."

The show is divided into four series: Self-Portraits, Friendship: Artists, Celebrities, Family, Studio: Brooklyn, Palazzo Chupi, Montauk, and Sculpture and Installation. Schnabel likes photographing the people close to him; the Friendship series includes Willem Dafoe, Max von Sydow and the artist Marina Abramović, as well as his two daughters and his twin sons.

We interviewed Peter Coeln, founder and director of OstLicht Gallery, which is putting on the show.

Q: QDaily

**Peter Coeln: Born in Austria in 1954. From 1977 to 1985 he worked as a freelance photographer for newspapers and magazines.**Over the nearly two decades since, he founded OstLicht. Gallery for Photography, the WestLicht Museum for Photography and the WestLicht Photographica Auction.

Interview translated by: Li Kaiyue

Q: How does Polaroid's instant development differ from traditional film and from digital photography, both in the making and in the thinking behind it? Why do people today, and artists today, still use Polaroid?

Peter Coeln: What sets a Polaroid apart from other photographs is that each one is a unique object rather than an image that can be reproduced. That is its singularity. Once a picture has developed, it is the only one there is. You can't copy it, you can't make a second one. It isn't digital information, it's a physical thing: you can hold it in your hand, you can feel its weight.

I don't know why, but it really does draw a lot of young people. I think people in this era are drowning in too much information — online, in newspapers, on their phones — and Polaroid, as a distinctive medium, strikes something new in young people, or perhaps something old.

For artists it matters even more, because every photograph is one of a kind. This form gives the artist who works in it a particular kind of inspiration.

Q: What made OstLicht choose to show Schnabel's Polaroid work?

Peter Coeln: A year and a half ago I met Julian Schnabel in Vienna. He said he had never been to Vienna and had never shown there. He's a world-famous artist and film director, and I already knew his book Julian Schnabel: Polaroids, so I said, let's do a show of his Polaroid work in Vienna.

We chose this body of work because the size of it is so interesting. When an artist this well known takes up photography, it always catches the eye; it's always interesting.

Q: Compared with the exhibition in Austria, some works are not being shown in China. What was the standard for picking these 32 works for Shanghai?

Peter Coeln: The gallery in Vienna has more space, so it could show more work. We picked 32 out of 55 to bring to Shanghai.

Sometimes the choice is a matter of feel; there's no clear-cut standard. At the same time we were taking part in a big contemporary art fair in Vienna that also had Julian Schnabel's work in it. So we chose the pieces that felt better suited to showing in China and left the others for the fair in Vienna.

(Q: And what makes a piece suited to showing in China?)

I don't really know the Chinese market yet, or the taste of Chinese art lovers, so this time it was my own call. I'm still learning, still trying to understand what enthusiasts here think and how they see things. Schnabel's photographs cover many different subjects, so we took some work from each part, to show the audience as many sides as we could.

Q: Looking at what OstLicht collects, the biggest holdings are war photography, the space program, Cuban photography (1930s-1970s) and Polaroid. Why such an interest in those areas?

And generally speaking, what are the gallery's collecting criteria?

Peter Coeln: We never had a fixed idea at the start; the chance came up (that happens). We've collected many photographs of the Cuban Revolution, for instance, but we never decided to collect that many and then went looking for them. One day the opportunity appeared, I bought the first photograph on the subject, then I began actively hunting for more and more, and the collection gradually took shape.

The chance behind our Polaroid holdings was that the collection originally belonged to the Polaroid Corporation. When the company faced bankruptcy, it had to sell the work. We had the opportunity then, and we liked the work a lot, so we bought quite a bit.

Polaroid is also a very personal aspect for me. I used to be a professional photographer, and for 20 years I used a Polaroid camera to test a shot before taking it (everything was film then, so you'd shoot a Polaroid first to see what you had). So I love Polaroid cameras; there's a lot of personal feeling in it.

Our criterion, generally, is work with important historical or artistic value — and of course some work has both. We've bought many large collections and many sets of photographs, and of course not every picture in them is the best picture. If you have a collection of 150,000 photographs, you can't guarantee that every one is the best. I like photographs that come in sets. Decades ago you'd see a lot of sets in magazines, all of them together telling one story. A lot has changed in this era — the media have changed, and many things have changed how instant photography speaks. Our instant-photography collection holds many sets.

(So are the auctions also by the set?)

If photographs come as a set, we don't break them up to sell. And at our own auctions the works are all consigned by other people; they're not from our collection.

In many series, the one photograph everyone knows, the famous one, is a single frame. Take Elliott Erwitt's set on the "Kitchen Debate," the argument between Khrushchev and Nixon (in July 1959, at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and then US Vice President Richard Nixon debated the relative merits of socialism and capitalism). Only one photograph from that set is known — the one with the pointing finger — but there are many others. Time magazine covered it at the time, and there were in fact 12 photographs. Only the one with the gesture was withheld: they felt that gesture looked too aggressive for the Cold War, so they didn't release it. And today it's the one photograph everybody knows by heart. But without the whole set, that single frame would never have become known.

Q: Once photography moved into the era of digital cameras and everyone taking pictures, did what you collect change at all?

Peter Coeln: Digital photography doesn't affect our collecting. It's like how most cameras today are digital, and that hasn't hurt the value of mechanical film cameras; on the contrary, their value keeps rising.

(So has the object of collecting changed?)

It hasn't really changed, only the medium has. It used to be kept on film, now it's kept on digital media, and the copyright still belongs to the author, so it hasn't really changed the value of the work. You just no longer need chemical development to make the picture.

Q: The gallery represents Ren Hang and Nobuyoshi Araki. How do you see Chinese photography, and Eastern photographic art?

Peter Coeln: In Austria, people don't know many Chinese photographers. Ren Hang became famous very fast in the past few years. I was surprised myself: after we opened his exhibition, I hadn't expected how many people would come, how many already knew his name. You can see the power of social media in this era. His work still amazes me today. We have his complete exhibition body of work, and that collection may be the only one of its kind in the world.

Nobuyoshi Araki is also one of a kind, and I'm especially close to him. He has been making photographs since the 1970s, and his body of work runs on unbroken. Japan already had many very good photographers in the 1970s, and plenty of photography exhibitions and photobooks. These things are gradually appearing in China too, of course, but they're still not that well known, especially abroad. Martin Parr, the president of Magnum, recently published a book on Chinese photography, and it was a happy surprise for me: it showed me how many good photographers and photobooks China has. The book is called The Chinese Photobook.

(Were they already famous before you showed their work?)

Araki was already very famous in the 1970s and 1980s, and we were showing him then.

Ren Hang was young, but he was already famous before we showed him. Because of his reach on social media, he already had a lot of followers and fans.

There's a big difference there: Araki made his name in an era with no social networks, through his photobooks and his exhibitions. Ren Hang got most of his attention through social networks.

Q: Are there cameras or photographs in your own private collection?

Peter Coeln: I'm not really collecting cameras now. I do own some — the first camera in the world made for commercial purposes, for instance — and I have 150,000 photographs and more than 30,000 photobooks.

As for me, I'm the sort of person who has no preference for any one country's food. If it tastes good, I'll try it.

Q: Do you still take pictures yourself?

Peter Coeln: I still take pictures, but sadly not on film any more. I use my phone and a light Leica (a Leica Q).

Twenty years ago, when digital photography was starting out, I stopped being a professional photographer.

These days I photograph whatever surprises me in daily life. And I'm under no pressure to produce work. Photography can become a mania, or a way of living — always trying to see the world through a lens — but I've been through that stage. Beyond that, I'm surrounded by the work of the world's best photographers and by their exhibitions, so I don't need to do it myself. Every day I'm surrounded by the best photographs in the world.

(Do you want to record pieces of your own life?)

Not really. I'm far too disorganized; I don't have the ability to sort my own photographs.

(And do you still use a Polaroid camera yourself?)

Sometimes. I enjoy using Polaroid and the fun it brings. I love watching a Polaroid picture come up (instantly).

Exhibition Information

《转瞬：朱利安·施纳贝尔》

Instant: Julian Schnabel

Dates: September 8, 2018 – October 28, 2018 (Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00-19:00)

Venue: MAB Modern Art Base (Building 2, Bridge 8, No. 10 Jianguo Middle Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai)

Organizer: MAB Modern Art Base

Co-organizer: OstLicht Gallery (Vienna)

Admission: Free

Cover image photographed by QDaily