The New York Times’s Randy Kennedy reports that someone has finally stepped up to keep the Polaroid collection in tact. The first opportunity to do this was missed last year when a court-ordered sale at Sotheby’s brought $12.4m to Polaroid’s creditors. Many more photographs remained in the company’s archives.
Another collection of more than 4,500 prints by 850 artists had been held in trust since 1990 at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. That trove, known as the International Collection, has now been acquired by the WestLicht photo gallery in Vienna, a 10-year-old institution that collects photographs and antique cameras, with the help of the Impossible Project, founded by photo enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who saved the last Polaroid instant-film plant in the Netherlands and are now producing new film for Polaroid cameras. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Major Polaroid Collection to Be Kept Intact, in Vienna (Arts Beat/New York Times)_
