LONDON.- Like stills from a beautiful film, this selection of Polaroid photographs by Miles Aldridge are compelling, alluring and tense with disquiet and brimming with ambiguity. His works possess their own mysterious charisma. Some seem forensic and cold, others agents of pure glamour, rich with erotic insinuation.
When Aldridge started in the early 1990s, using Polaroid was a standard working method. As digital photography became more prevalent, however, this process became more specialised. Aldridge remains dedicated to shooting in film, using Polaroids to pre-check and document his shoots.
The act of photographing the same scene repetitively has a post-modern undertone, undermining the sense of reality. Going through this process creates an artificiality that Aldridge enjoys – asking the model to laugh convincingly again and again, or step in and out of a car repeatedly.
The Polaroids often show the progression of a picture acting as studies, in much the same way that painters and sculptors make preparatory drawings. Like these, some survive and are archived, while others are discarded and become studio detritus. The Polaroids allow Aldridge to manipulate the scene quickly and try out changes before shooting with actual film.
The images displayed in this exhibition, spanning almost two decades of Aldridge’s career, are anomalies and have taken on a new life and special quality beyond their preparatory intention.
They have elements of intrigue and interest – a model’s startled expression or a melted surface, creases, tears and annotations. The ambiguities create an abstract, cinematic narrative of their own.
Aldridge’s Polaroids capture unintended and sometimes inexplicable moments that highlight the strangeness in a normal and everyday world. For him, the camera is veracious.
Aldridge comments, After a Polaroid was exposed it was kept warm under the armpit of one of my assistants for 120 seconds (30 seconds for black and white) before being peeled apart. The Polaroid would then be referred to for lighting, colour and composition. At the end of the shoot, a set of Polaroids with notes to my lab would be included with the shot film with the instruction “Please Return Polaroid”.
Coinciding with this exhibition is the launch of the 190-page book Please Return Polaroid, published by Steidl. Here, Aldridge revisits his archive of twenty very prolific years of magazine assignments. Many of these Polaroids were intentionally or accidentally damaged while working on different shoots — trimming, adjusting, marking, cutting, pasting, outlining specific details in order to enhance, modify, reassemble or discard. Liberated from their original context, the images take on a life of their own. By partly enlarging and arranging the Polaroids in unexpected ways, Aldridge treats them as singular, independent images. We are granted a rare insight into a photographer’s storyboard while learning to appreciate the importance of flaws and imperfections on the journey to the finished photograph.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with renowned jeweler Tessa Packard.
Alongside the exhibition, Aldridge is working with Maggie Centres. He has donated a work to their charity auction in April and will be taking Polaroids during the exhibition reception in exchange for donations to the charity.
Miles Aldridge was born in London in 1964, where he continues to live and work today. He studied at Central St. Martin’s and after graduating worked briefly as an illustrator before finding his way to photography in 1993. He is best known for his unsettling images of glamorous but disconcerted women that combine vibrant colour, cinematic narrative, and meticulous attention to detail.
His photographs have appeared regularly in international publications such as American Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and most notably Vogue Italia, who he has worked closely with throughout his career. There are several books devoted to his work, including Pictures for Photographs (2009); Other Pictures (2012); and I Only Want You to Love Me (2013) – an extensive monograph of his photographs and drawings that accompanied a major retrospective of his work at Somerset House by the same title. In April 2014, he was invited by Tate Britain to create a temporary installation entitled Carousel II, as a response to Mark Gertler’s 1916 painting, Merry-go-Round.
