Polaroid

Second Chance at Saving the Polaroid Collection Succeeds

March 29, 2011 by Marion Maneker

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)_

The Polaroid Collection Goes On

August 19, 2010 by Marion Maneker

The Boston Globe‘s Cate McQuaid reminds us that only a small fraction of the Polaroid Corporation’s corporate collection was sold in Sotheby’s very strong $12.5m sale. Some images from the rest of the collection are on view at Gallery 4 in Rhode Island:

Many pieces here are experimental. Ellen Carey’s terrific abstract photographs, made by exposing the film to a flash of light or not exposing it at all, and then pulling it through a large-format camera’s internal rollers, hang like scrolls on the wall, all at once invoking Japanese Zen calligraphy, lush painting, and photography. John Reuter offers a dozen surrealist photo constructions from the 1970s. Reuter peeled back the film and manipulated the dyes and emulsions as the image developed. His “Afterglow’’ looks as if he has applied a 19th-century portrait of a melancholy boy to the print; he hovers, frail yet sharp, against a pungently colored background.Continue Reading

Who Bought All the Polaroids?

July 1, 2010 by Marion Maneker

The Wall Street Journal identifies a single bidder who was buying in bulk at the Polaroid sale:

A bidding war developed over two of Mr. Warhol’s 1979 self-portraits, each priced between $10,000 and $15,000. The first of the 20-by-24-inch images, “Self-Portrait (Grimace),” sold for $146,500 to a single telephone bidder, setting a new record for the artist’s photography at auction. That record was promptly broken with the subsequent lot, “Self-Portrait (Eyes Closed),” which enticed more than seven bidders before going to the same buyer for $254,000.

The telephone bidder, identified only as L0153, bought so many of the sale’s works – including pieces by Mr. Adams, William Wegman and Lucas Samaras, among others – that sale attendees began to whisper, and later chuckle, each time the auctioneer acknowledged the specialist bidding on paddle LO153’s behalf. Sotheby’s declined to identify the buyer.

Sotheby’s Photo Sales Take in $12.5 Million (Wall Street Journal)

Polaroid Sale Final Tally $12.5m

June 24, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Sotheby’s sale of works from the Polaroid collectiong was primarily an Ansel Adams affair with numerous examples of the photographer’s work finding strong competition (though there were more than a few disappointments or average sellers.)