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Thursday, February 13, 2025

EMOP Berlin 2025: Polaroids. Group exhibition – Helmut Newton Foundation | 06.03.-27.07.2025

Editors’ Choice

On 6 March 2025, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new group exhibition ‘Polaroids’ as part of EMOP Berlin 2025 with works by Helmut Newton and numerous colleagues. with works by Helmut Newton, Thorsten Brinkmann, Lucien Clergue, Barbara Crane, Alma Davenport, Toto Frima, Maurizio Galimberti, Luigi Ghirri, Erich Hartmann, Sally Mann, Sheila Metzner, Arnold Newman, Charles Johnstone, Marike Schuurman, Stephen Shore, Jeanloup Sieff, Pola Sieverding, Christer Strömholm, Oliviero Toscani, Ulay, William Wegman and others.

Abb. oben: Helmut Newton, Italian Vogue, Monte Carlo 2003 (SX-70)© Helmut Newton Foundation.

The Polaroid process has revolutionised photography since the 1960s. Anyone who has ever used this camera will never forget the smell of the developing emulsion and the fascination with the instant image. Sometimes it developed on its own, whereas with some processes it was also necessary to draw a fixing liquid over the surface of the image. In this respect, it is a forerunner of today’s digital photography – not in photographic terms, but because of its rapid availability.

Polaroids as prints are mostly unique. In almost all photographic genres – landscape, still life, portrait, fashion and nude – and all over the world, the unusual image technique found enthusiastic users. Helmut Newton also loved to take pictures with different Polaroid cameras and with the help of instant film backs, which replaced the roll film cassettes of his medium format cameras. He did this from the 1960s until his death in 2004, mainly in preparation for his fashion shoots. In this context, Polaroids correspond to a kind of sketch of ideas and at the same time serve to check the specific lighting situation and image composition. Nevertheless, Newton dedicated a separate book to these instant images in 1992, even though they were initially created as mere preliminary studies, and a second book was published posthumously in 2011. Helmut Newton signed some Polaroids as independent works; they are now traded for high sums on the art market.

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Helmut Newton, French Vogue, Yves Saint Laurent, Paris 1977 (Polacolor)© Helmut Newton
Foundation

The Berlin Foundation archive contains hundreds of such original Polaroids; a new representative selection has now been made from these and supplemented by Polaroid enlargements. The photographs are arranged more or less chronologically, not according to genre; nevertheless, it is clear that Newton used his Polaroid camera for decades in all areas of his work. The presentation resembles a look into the sketchbook of one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century and at the same time allows visitors to follow, at least in their mind’s eye, the creative process from the initial image idea to the final photograph released by Newton.

In the current group exhibition, Newton’s Polaroids are complemented by numerous works by more than 60 additional photographers, including in cooperation with OstLicht Wien, from whose large Polaroid collection curator Matthias Harder was able to choose freely. Thanks to the initiative of Peter Coeln, founder of WestLicht Vienna, the former International Polaroid Collection, which had been stored by the Polaroid company for over 20 years and contained around 4,400 works by 800 photographers, was purchased by WestLicht in 2010 and thus rescued in its entirety from the company’s bankruptcy estate and re-institutionalised.

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Pola Sieverding, Valet #54, 2014 (Integralfilm / Polaroid) © Pola Sieverding

The Berlin group exhibition includes a wide variety of Polaroid processes and image formats – SX-70, Polacolor 20 x 24, FP-100 or Polaroid T808 – as well as experimental further processing of individual prints or entire tableaus. Pola Sieverding is represented with her small-format SX-70 Polaroid series ‘Valet’, which shows close-ups of male wrestlers. Her Italian colleague Maurizio Galimberti, on the other hand, creates monumental Polaroid mosaics – a truly physical act in which he obsessively circles the subject of the picture, be it a person, a building or a flower. He later assembles the individual images, each of which shows only a tiny detail, into an overall picture that appears three-dimensionally unfolded.

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Marike Schuurman, aus der Serie Toxic (Bergheider See PH 3), 2022(SX-70 / Inkjet-Print) © Marike Schuurman, Courtesy Dorothée Nilsson Gallery

The two series by Marike Schuurman are also experimental in nature: Inkjet print enlargements based on SX-70 Polaroids. ‘Toxic’ is an exploration of the brown coal mining area in Lusatia, south of Berlin. The mining of the coal created craters that were filled with water, which in turn is very acidic. Schuurman photographed the artificial lakes with a Polaroid camera and had the SX-70 prints developed in the low pH water, which radically changed the colours of the Polaroids. In the second series, ‘Expired’, the colours of the long-expired film material melt away.

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Charles Johnstone, Lea, South Salem, New York, 2021 (FP-100c Polaroid)© Charles Johnstone

Charles Johnstone publishes small-format publications with his Polaroids at irregular intervals, each with a completed picture story. Some projects, for example about Monica Vitti, are created as camera views on a screen and are ultimately bound into a book; for other sequences, such as ‘Escape’, Johnstone works closely with a real model, shot en plein air at a swimming pool in upstate New York, among other places. In this way, completely independent artist’s books are created, some with inserted C-prints of the Polaroids as special editions, which can be found in a display case in the centre of the room.

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Sheila Metzner, Michal, Mermaid, 1980 (Polacolor)© Sheila Metzner

The American photographer Sheila Metzner was already presented at the Helmut Newton Foundation a few years ago with her timeless and sensitive portraits, still lifes and nudes, realised as Fresson Prints. Her Polaroids, which were in the Newtons’ personal collection and are presented here for the first time, now reveal her approach, comparable to Newton’s, of preparing certain motifs compositionally with the help of such instant images.

Whether in series or as a single image, in the form of a gigantic Polaroid mosaic or as an artist’s book – the new exhibition ‘Polaroids’ is the largest presentation of this photographic process to be seen in Berlin for a long time.

WHEN?

Opening: Thursday, 6. March 2025, from 7 pm

Exhibition period: Friday, 7. March until Sunday, 27. July 2025

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 11 am to 7 pm
Thursdays: 11 am to 8 pm
Closed on Mondays

WHERE?

Helmut Newton Foundation
Museum für Fotografie
Jebensstrasse 2
D – 10623 Berlin

COSTS?

Regular: 12 EUR
Reduced: 6 EUR

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