I've been making photographs for 48 years and I've used Polaroid probably since 1967
or 68.
The great thing about Polaroid is, like I say, you're not stealing someone's image.
You know, the thing comes out of the camera, it goes up on the wall.
They can react to it and they say, oh my god.
Actually, I was exposed to Polaroid as a young boy and my father was a Polaroid photographer.
His family photos were always Polaroid, so growing up, to me, that's what photography was.
It was Polaroid imagery and instant imagery.
It would be some of the really unique and wonderful things that a photographer can do with Polaroid stuff.
Polaroid made some film for the 8x10 camera and I used it on landscapes and on portraits
and got incredible results with it.
And there was a period in the early 80s when I was doing large format portraits of redheads.
You know, stand there and I would just make the picture and we'd pull it out.
They'd see the picture.
I'd make another one for them.
I kept one for myself.
And I did this in the course of five hours, made 120 portraits.
And you could only do that with Polaroid because no other film was instant.
Its own thing.
There's nothing else like it.
It has its own color range.
It describes reality in the Polaroid way.
And, you know, it's special.
The camera that I shot is an old 4x5 graphics with a Polaroid back.
And I took instant pictures of all the people that I drew for years.
4x5 back is really important for photographers.
You know, you get the print, you know what you want, and you now know what's on the negative.
I mean, it's an incredible process.
You know, as always, they love the camera.
They love looking in the back of it.
They love watching the print come out.
It goes up in the wall.
It goes up in the wall.
It goes up in the wall.
And then I think we ended up probably shooting for an hour and a half or something like that.
The camera is the vehicle or the conduit or the whatever for, you know,
for that communication back and forth.
And you can say we can look in the back of a digital camera, not the same.
So, little bit of patience is putting in
our image and in its own right.
But how do you end up
making myself look incredible?
Impressed expectations.
I'm not a retrattist, I'm not a paesagist.
My colour is never the same, depending on how you wake up in the morning,
the movie that is in the charger, it has a cup of humidity,
a cup of green, red and yellow, but it always surprises me.
I like the fact that my colour is the result of this surprise.
New York is a city that I try to compose almost mathematically.
Let's say 5 for 10, 50, 5 rows in height, 10 for width and 10 for height.
Let's say that in 50 numbers, in 50 tessere, I play this space
with an almost mathematical operation where the line perfection is also there,
where there is a futuristic movement, a kinetic movement,
but there is also a real rhythmic scan.
When you go to photograph an actress,
and they see that you have that big camera,
it is a unique experience for them also.
The subject really participates in the experience of being photographed
because they see a huge image immediately.
It's very different when you're shooting digitally
and they see a small image on a screen and they're looking.
Now they see a big finished image of themselves up on a wall
and they can really evaluate what they look like.
They can see it completed.
More important to me, what attracted me as an artist
is what I refer to as the plasticity of the medium.
And by that I mean the physical characteristics
because every Polaroid film has a physicality to it rather than just an image.
It's an actual physical thing and the way the film goes through the rollers,
the fact that it transfers from the negative to the positive to create the image.
For me, the real experience of the work is standing right in front of the piece
because you can see there's a lot of texture, there's color,
all these things happening that kind of get lost in a reproduction.
Thank you.
