The Polaroid Project 1983–2014: Notes from the Knute Rockne Oasis

Abstract

Visual Studies Workshop is walking to realize a publication initiated in 1982 by art historians Susie Cohen and Bill Johnson. In 1983, Polaroid Corporation funded a proposal by Cohen and Johnson to document the creative process by facilitating a collaboration among photographers. Robert Frank, Dave Heath, Robert Heinecken, and John Wood. The text that 'allows includes excerpts from Cohen and Johnsons' writing from 1982 to 1986 and comprises something of a journal of the people, places, institutions, and ideas that came to be known as The Polaroid Project. For the upcoming publication, Jessica S. McDonald, chief curator of photography at the Ham' Ransom Center at the. University of Texas at Austin, will provide a reconsideration of The Polaroid Project from historical and contemporary perspectives Thirty years ago, four photographers--Robert Frank, Dave Heath, Robert Heinecken, and John Wood--agreed to collaborate with each other and with us to make an exhibition that presented not only their finished work, but also the decisions and actions they made during the creative process. At that time, photography exhibitions displayed only the polished results of an artist's effort. Our goal was to show something of the process of creativity itself. From spring 1983 to spring 1986, we facilitated and observed meetings among the artists, their individual uses of the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera, interviewed and selected work with each artist, and shaped the collected materials into a multimedia exhibition with an illustrated catalog. Susie and I had been thinking about what exhibitions did well and what they did poorly while I was assembling the W. Eugene Smith archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Our first attempt to bring the traces of an artist's creative evolution into the exhibition space was a collaboration with Todd Walker, featured artist of the 1979 University of Arizona annual faculty art show. After many interviews with Todd and months digging through decades of his creative output, we helped him install an exhibition of recent photographs together with the experiments, drafts, and rejects he had made on the way to the final prints. Susie and I each wrote an essay for the exhibition catalog, ... one thing just sort of lead to another ... , which Todd designed and printed on his own small press. We had worked side by side and talked about work constantly, but our essays couldn't have been more dissimilar. Mine was a detailed account of Todd's life and creative evolution. Susie's was a reflective piece, musing on how images projected his sensibility. We saw that our different voices reflected personal and professional decisions and that these, too; should be acknowledged as creative process. We shared our exhibition interests and concerns with friends Robert Heinecken in Los Angeles and Dave Heath in Toronto. Both were interested and supportive of the ideas, but neither Susie nor I had an institutional affiliation that would support such an exhibition. Not long after, Carl Chiarenza (mentor to both Susie and I) introduced me to Eelco Wolf, vice president at the Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I helped him with a Polaroid-sponsored exhibition of work by the photojournalist Lucien Aigner and, in turn, received his promise to consider our exhibition idea when I was finished with other projects. Moving from Tucson to Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1982, we stopped in Rochester, New York, and discussed the idea with Nathan and Joan Lyons, who helped solidify the concepts and suggested John Wood, in Alfred, New York, as a participant. Eelco Wolf kept his word. He agreed on the basis of a wordy presentation and a minimal written proposal (no budget, timeline, or defined product) to fund us to contact artists and, with them, to develop a more concrete project. From then on, it was The Polaroid Project. The first to sign on was Heinecken, then Heath, and then Wood. …