Sotheby's is auctioning off the archives of this once great American company, writes Peter Conrad
Photographs, being infinitely reproducible, shouldn't have an intrinsic commercial value.
But the art market over the past few decades has done a fine job of leveraging images and systematically inflating their prices, and the prints on office walls now qualify as a corporate asset. When companies fail, art is among the spoils that the creditors squabble over.
The Polaroid Corporation collapsed in 2008. Its share of the photographic market had been eroded by a newer digital technology, but what brought it down was the exposure of a Ponzi scheme - an investment fraud like the one the notorious trickster Bernard Madoff operated - at its parent company.
A judge appointed to settle Polaroid's debts decreed that its photographic archive, secreted in what the conservation departments of museums call "deep storage" in a warehouse in Massachusetts, should be handed over to the liquidators.
More than 1200 of the choicest specimens are being auctioned by Sotheby's in New York in a sale on June 20-21.
The yield is expected to be between US$8 million ($11.7 million) and US$12 million, although the competitive hysteria that such occasions excite will probably edge that upwards.
One lot alone - a mural-sized view of the Sierra Nevada from the Californian town of Lone Pine by Ansel Adams, who was hired as a consultant and propagandist by Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid technology - is estimated to fetch US$500,000; those who miss out can bid on five other prints of the same image in a variety of formats.
The story of the collection, like everything to do with the trade in art, is somewhat murky.
Land, a crackpot genius like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, left Harvard in the late 1920s after a year studying chemistry and began inventing things: he held more than 500 patents for gadgets that extended from night-vision goggles worn by soldiers during World War II to light-polarising sunglasses.
His eureka moment came when he photographed his daughter on a holiday in New Mexico in 1943.
With a child's desire for instant gratification, she asked why the snapshot couldn't be developed immediately. Land took that as a challenge, and by cultivating sulfite crystals that were painstakingly manoeuvred into alignment he found a way of manufacturing a film that required no trip to the chemist and no fiddly, messy immersion in a tank in a darkened room.
As if by magic, the negative turned into a positive as you watched.
Land touted his invention as a democratic amenity, like Edison's bulbs or Ford's Model-T: now the American Everyman could set himself up as an artist.
The SX-70, Land's most popular camera, was as convenient as a mobile phone, folding flat so it could be stuffed in a pocket. Its styling - a skin of brushed aluminium with a panel of inlaid leather - flattered the user, advertising modernity while hinting at gentility.
Like all good, exploitable ideas, this one had to be constantly reinvented so that consumers did not become bored. Although Land began by selling the Polaroid as something anyone could and should own, he also shrewdly fetishised his product, dreaming up ever more complicated cameras and engaging celebrated photographers to test them.
At first, Polaroid's appeal lay in its portability and simplicity. But American entrepreneurs think big. Land went on to design a 20in by 24in camera, which had to be cumbersomely transported to the artists who were chosen to use it: manoeuvred into the New York apartment of Lucas Samaras; freighted to Robert Rauschenberg in Florida.
By the 1980s Land had come up with a 40in by 80in camera, an immovable piece of furniture that was permanently domiciled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it made life-sized reproductions of paintings on single sheets of Polacolor film.
The photographers who experimented with it, including Samaras, needed to engage assistants who actually sat inside it. Camera comes from the Latin for "chamber", and this one - belying the pocket-sized handiness of the early models - was a virtual room.
Tempting photographers with his contraptions, Land entered into a barter agreement with them. He supplied the hardware; in return they were to donate photographs to his corporate collection (which was augmented by a "library set" of classic non-Polaroid images which Land commissioned Adams to buy from his friends and colleagues).
A loosely phrased contract permitted Polaroid to license and publish the images, while allowing the photographers to retain copyright and guaranteeing them access to their work at any time. Now that the collection is to be sold off, the terms of this deal have been questioned, and there may yet be a legal challenge to the sale.
A federal judge in Oklahoma is rallying protest, pointing out that the bankruptcy court didn't appreciate that Polaroids are unique, which means that the photographers will forfeit their right of access when their images are in private hands.
The painter Chuck Close, who made a series of collaged self-portraits with the 20 by 24 camera, has denounced the sale as "criminal".
But so far, as Sotheby's rather smugly announced, no photographer has made a legitimate case for the return of items destined for the block.
This wrangling is marginal, and in the end will enrich only a few lawyers. What matters is the chance, before the collection's dispersal, to examine the relationship between technology and vision, science and art.
Garry Winogrand once said that he took photographs in order to see how things looked when they were photographed: he expected them to look different, alchemically transformed by their transit through the camera.
What, specifically, do things look like when photographed on Polaroid film?
Some of the Adams images - palm-sized, without the monumentality of his landscapes of the American west, and often in colour rather than the subtly graded black and white we associate with him - offer an answer.
The world according to Polaroid has what Adams called "a subtle glow". Its pigmentation is dense, saturated, making a lichen-coated rock or a scrap of oxidised metal softly luminous. Objects lose the chiselled sharpness of the granitic peaks Adams photographed in Yosemite. His Polaroids exclude sublimity; they specialise in a delicate, unexpectedly intimate beauty.
Adams thought the optics of Polaroid made it possible to "literally paint with colour". He used the verb metaphorically, but a later generation of artists, dabbling in the wet emulsion before the exposed print had set, turned their Polaroids into a compromise between photography and drawing.
Robert Frank scribbled messages on the surface. Rauschenberg, rather than properly coating the film, used a paintbrush to smear it with kitchen bleach, then left his prints in the sun to curl and mottle. Les Krims marbleised the white borders of the images, surrounding nude figures with luxuriant frames of art nouveau verdure.
The result was such a hybrid that Krims invented a punning compound word to classify his Polaroids, which he called "Fictcryptokrimsographs".
Other artists had to overcome their suspicion that the camera was a trivial toy. David Hockney began to use the SX-70 by accident.
He bought one in Los Angeles to help him identify the negatives of photographs a visiting curator had chosen for an exhibition in Paris. After the curator left, Hockney picked up the discarded camera and idly decided to see what else it could do.
One result was a dual portrait of two young girls, an assemblage of 63 Polaroids that cubistically overcomes the dull repetitiveness of the square format, and explores the relativity of vision itself ; it is expected to sell at Sotheby's for up to US$50,000.
Walker Evans took up the Polaroid at the end of his career, insisting "nobody should touch a Polaroid until he's over 60". He worried about the fatal facility of the equipment; the "things that pop out" would only be significant if a long training told the photographer what to look for.
Despite his misgivings, the SX-70 became an obsession during the two years before his death in 1975, and he turned its technical limitations to poetic advantage.
Its colours were fickle, unfixed, inclining towards coppery green, but this gives Evans' images - of faded signs on brick walls, or derelict farmhouses in the Alabama county he had photographed for his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in the late 1930s - the miasmal tint of decay.
Adams somehow made the clumps of rock he photographed radiate from within; in Evans's Polaroids, the same light looks funereal, as gothic as fog that hovers above a swamp.
Dying, Evans looked for subjects that had predeceased him, like a series of junked cars that rust and decompose in the Connecticut woods. Sotheby's is selling five of these prints, which show the crates of crumpled metal apparently being swallowed up by the omnivorous, indiscriminate American earth - an elegy, now, for the dead technology of Polaroid itself.
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