MAJOR POLAROID COLLECTION HITS THE AUCTION BLOCK
A large collection of Polaroids brought together by Polaroid’s founder, Edwin H. Land, going on the auction block, reports the New York Times. The collection includes shots by Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams, and Chuck Close.
The company that Land started in 1937 became a victim of the digital age, going bust first in 2001 and again in 2008. The second time, after it was bought by Petters Group Worldwide, Polaroid was caught up in a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme run by the company’s founder, a Minnesota businessman named Tom Petters, who was convicted in December of fraud and money laundering, among other charges.
To pay off creditors, a bankruptcy court in Minnesota is forcing Polaroid to sell a portion of its collection at Sotheby’s in New York on June 21 and 22. On offer will be four hundred photographs by Ansel Adams alone, along with prints by Close, Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol, and Lucas Samaras. Together the twelve hundred objects are expected to fetch $7.5 million to $11.5 million.
“It’s an amazing body of work,” Close said in a telephone interview. “There’s really nothing like it in the history of photography.” But, he added, “to sell it is criminal.”
While he and other artists would have liked the collection kept intact in a museum’s holdings, John R. Stoebner, the court-appointed trustee for Polaroid, said he had talks with several museums, including the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, but was never able to reach a deal.
The collection has its roots in the Artist Support Program, a project Land started after realizing how important artists’ input was in improving his products. It was a handy arrangement, the collection’s longtime curator, Barbara Hitchcock, explained: Polaroid provided some of the greatest talents around with equipment and film, and they gave the company photographs. “Experimentation was encouraged by Polaroid,” Hitchcock added. “It was a mantra—experimentation, creativity, innovation, pushing the envelope of photography.”
Rauschenberg, for instance, used bleach to make his large Polaroid 1990s prints Bleacher Series: Japanese Sky and Bleacher Series: North Carolina, both of which are included in the sale. He turned to the chemical after some black-and-white photos faded in the sun when he left them to dry.
As the years went by, the company amassed thousands of examples of work by Rauschenberg and other celebrated artists, many of whom relied on Polaroid’s twenty-by-twenty-four-inch camera. Hitchcock recalls Warhol, in particular, as a Polaroid nut who frequently used the camera and film at the Factory, his studio. Land collected conventionally made prints, too, believing that showing them alongside Polaroids would illustrate his products’ high quality.
For six days before the auction, Sotheby’s plans to put the images on public view in an exhibition expected to take up its entire York Avenue headquarters. This is likely to be the first and last time the cream of Polaroid’s collection will be seen together.
