Polaroids in the Helmut Newton Foundation: Each picture unique

When the US physicist Edwin Land invented the Polaroid in 1947, photography was actually a lengthy process. Dark chamber, chemical liquids, plenty of patience and sensitivity it took for the photo to finally be considered. Polaroid packed all of the layer model, which was built together with the developer solution, firmly welded: Simply awesome.

Every picture unique. Today a cell phone photo is there at the same time anyway, nothing exciting. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a polaroid camera was a must-have, ideally foldable and always there. In 2008 this threatened. The company announced that the production was hired. A company called “The Impossible Project” saved the instant photography. And the story goes on.

What can be done in the medium of polaroid and which range is technically and artistically possible, the Helmut Newton Foundation tears out using 250 exhibits, most of course from the landlord Newton itself.

Marike Schuurman from the Netherlands throws her polaroid landscape shots into the cloudy water of open-cast mine in Lusatia. What is created there is abstract painting with the means of chemistry and chance. The streaks inflated into large format are beauty, are dirt, are poison. “Toxic” calls the artist scanned from 2022. However, the inkjet prints increase the rough charm of the small-format SX-70 polaroid original. Of course, the handy unique pieces are not optimal for exhibition.

Maurizio Galimberti lends thirty or sixty pieces to the tableau instead of a recording. So he composes multiple photo papers from fragments of a face. Johnny Depp, for example, poses, as in the group portrait with himself. The world’s largest polaroid camera, on the other hand, used the Hamburg Thorsten Brinkmann for his self-presentation as a tragicomic king with curtain rod scepter.

The giant deductions also show the pitfalls of a not always perfect development process. Only a few copies of this 100 kilograms weighing and man -sized Balgen camera are used worldwide. The Polaroid itself started a clever campaign with the giant trump in the 1970s. She invited well -known photo chase to work with the exception camera. Condition: One recording ended up in the company archive.

Even Andy Warhol was model

Curator Matthias Harder was allowed to draw from this treasure, which has now belonged to the Ostlicht Collection in Vienna. In addition to the spectacular large formats, he also selected smaller polaroids, each work per photographer. Still life are, body pictures, abstract compositions. William Wegman with his well-known Weimaran dogs is also part of it. Only many of these perfect studio recordings don’t look like Polaroids. The spontaneous, improvised man is. Probably the most famous Polaroid fan, Andy Warhol, is at least present as a portrayer: held with his polaroid camera.

Helmut Newton was given a polaroid camera for the first time in the 1960s. How he and his wife June took off each other in the south of France is exhibited as a mini series: Helmut on the sofa, June in the garden, Helmut and June naked when looking in the mirror. Unbeliented everyday snapshots are, nice and unbiased.

Newton kept it. For him, the Polaroid proved to be an ideal sketchbook. With every fashion shoot, whether for the Vogue or Yves Saint Laurent, he tested the Lichtetting and image composition in advance, recorded ideas at lightning speed. And he had many of it. Hundreds of recordings landed in the Berlin Foundation Archives. The selected 75 original polaroids, which require a close look, complement a selection of posthumous enlargements. At the request of his widow June, they were created for a first exhibition in 2011.

His big female act of the 1980s also prepared Newton with Polaroids. Kurator Harder says his obsession for legs goes back to his Berlin teacher YVA. In the studio of the photographer near the Kurfürstendamm, the Berlin born in 1936 learned from 1936 before both had to flee exile due to their Jewish origin. Yva’s series of women’s legs in silk stockings to just below the knee -length skirt hem was legendary.

Newton later often smuggled fake bodies, such as mannequins, false legs or breasts in his recordings of object -like staged and hyper -sexized top models. Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Grace Jones: In Polaroid, he held her first. This whole exuberant, highly staged Newton world from long-legged women, naked skin, surreal situations, surprising encounters, glamor, dynamics, situation comedy, eerie moments and indicated dramas is already completely there in the Polaroids. Only in small, not quite perfect. And just as unique.