Where Are the Missing 8000 Pieces from the Polaroid Collection?
Tom Petters mug shot, October 2008
U.S. v. Thomas Joseph Petters, 08-00364, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota (St. Paul) has run its course (at least pre-appeal, already announced). On Wednesday, December 2, after deliberating over a five-day stretch, a federal jury found Minnesota businessman Tom Petters guilty of masterminding a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 52-year-old founder of Petters Group Worldwide Inc. (PGW) — which once controlled the Polaroid Corp., among other businesses, and owned its now-imperiled photo collection — was convicted on all 20 counts of the indictment, including wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering. He faces life in prison without parole. (See the Wall Street Journal report by Susan Carey, “Petters Found Guilty of Fraud,” and the Boston Herald story, “Polaroid’s buyer found guilty in $3.7B Ponzi scheme.”)
Though potential future cellmate Bernie Madoff makes him look like a piker, Petters stands convicted of a massive scam. It’s his building the 2002 post-bankruptcy 1 Polaroid Corporation into his PGW pyramid that, as the scheme unraveled, drove that company into bankruptcy 2 in 2008. However, I should point out that another case, filed in Chicago Federal Court on November 23 by Ritchie Capital Management, argues that the bankruptcy was unnecessary and preventable, yet another scam. (See Bridget Freeland’s Nov. 23, 2009 report, “Tangle Increases as Petters Trial Ends,” from Courthouse News Service. Can you say “byzantine,” boys and girls?)
Be that as it may, Polaroid did plunge into a second bankruptcy, this time in Minneapolis. And this, in turn, generated the “Perils of the Polaroid Collection” cliffhanger we’ve now watched for much of 2009, with this nonpareil assemblage of one-of-a-kind works tied to the tracks and the locomotive of a pending Sotheby’s auction coming round the bend. (For my coverage of this debacle in this blog, click here.)
So no one in the photo/art world, including me, has any reason to wish Tom Petters well, or to speak up in his defense — with one possible exception: The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis benefitted from his largesse while he was riding high. He also gave away a lot of other loot (though not much more in the arts), so he did well by some along the way. But he has brought the extraordinary Polaroid Collection to the brink of destruction as a coherent entity, which I consider unforgivable. I’ll take the prosecution’s word, apparently quite persuasive to the jury, that Petters did everything of which they accused him, and possibly even more.
With that said, it seems highly unlikely to me that Petters personally made off with 6000-8000 prints from the Polaroid Collection, or authorized anyone else to do so. I assume that if any evidence to that effect had turned up during the gummint’s thorough investigation of his misdeeds, they’d gladly have added that charge to the bill of particulars. So here’s the question: If Tom Petters doesn’t have those prints, who does — and where are they now?
I ask it because, from examining reports, estimates, inventories, and official statements relating to the size of the Polaroid Collection, it appears that sometime between January 2003 and April 2009, somewhere between 6000 and 8000 works vanished from the Polaroid Collection. And no one seems to care — not the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court, which in August ’09 authorized the sale of the remainder of the collection at auction; not Sotheby’s, designated as the auction house of choice for the procedure; not the art/photo press, which to date has shown no interest in any aspect of the dissolution of this great collection; and not even the current possessors of the collection.
I’ve used the dates given above as timeline markers for the following reasons:
- By January 2003 the first Polaroid Corporation bankruptcy proceeding, which took place in the Delaware Bankruptcy Court, had run its course. All of Polaroid’s assets, including the complete Polaroid Collection, had been approved by Judge Peter Walsh of that court for transfer to new owners. In listing its assets, the original Polaroid Corporation had described the collection thus:
- “9. Art Objects. Polaroid maintains a collection of photographs and other art objects estimated to be in excess of 24,000 items. Polaroid has been working for the last three years, on an intermittent basis, cataloguing the collection and continues to do so. In light of this, fluctuations in the art market, and the significant expense of appraising the collection, the value of the collection remains undetermined.” (Emphasis added. That’s the entirety of what the original Polaroid Corporation told the Delaware Bankruptcy Court about the collection in 2002. See Exhibit A, clause 9, “Art Objects.”)
- The original Polaroid Corporation had no reason to exaggerate the size of the collection for this proceeding. Indeed, I’ve suggested that the skimpiness of their description of it to the court evidences an intent to minimize its significance, so as not to draw attention to the encumbering contracts that would have made the court’s approval of the sale of the collection unlikely. If anything, that would have led them to shrink rather than expand their estimate. (See my earlier post, “What Did Polaroid Know, and When Did Polaroid Know It? (conclusion).”) So, while the Polaroid Corporation’s estimate of the collection’s size was certainly subject to refinement, there’s no reason to believe that Polaroid’s rough count in 2002 was falsified or basically unreliable in any way.
- Virtually all discussion of the collection prior to that bankruptcy proceeding, and for some years thereafter, used the estimate of 22,000-24,000 items to describe the collection. This includes published writings by all of the collection’s curators (Manfred Heiting, Linda Benedict-Jones, and Barbara Hitchcock among them); published interviews with these curators and others involved in the development of the collection (Eelco Wolf, Sam Yanes); books and exhibitions drawn from the collection; and Polaroid’s own press releases and other publicity materials for the collection.
- Indeed, as recently as summer 2009, the website of the new corporate entity marketing Polaroid-branded products contained vestiges of the previous Polaroid Corporation’s website, including a page on the collection that gave “more than 22,000 images by more than 1000 photographers” as the complete collection’s contents. (Emphasis added. That page, and all pages relating to Polaroid’s collection and other aspects of its history, vanished from that website without a trace shortly after I linked to it on July 16. Now they’ve become “bounce” pages, forwarding automatically to the home page of the new Polaroid entity. Fortunately, the originals are cached at the WayBackMachine Internet Archive. Just to prove I’m not dreaming it up, here’s a link to that page.)
- Mysteriously, without explanation from anyone, and without any investigation into the discrepancy, that number got revised downward radically in the inventory submitted to the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court in April 2009. That inventory, now considered the official one on which the pending auction will rely, lists only 15,934 items.
Polaroid Camera, 1960s wood prototype
That’s more than a minor shortfall. Somehow, between early 2003 and early 2009, one-third of the Polaroid Collection, some 6000-8000 items, went astray. Where are they?
Part 1 of 1 | 2
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For those coming in late to these reports and inquiries regarding the fate of this unparalleled collection, here’s a sampling of photographers the collection includes, and how many prints by each of them it contains: Ansel Adams (627 photos), Paul Caponigro (671), Barbara Crane (103), Wendy Ewald (139), Philippe Halsman (198), Yousuf Karsh (136), Barbara Kasten (79), David Levinthal (59), Patrick Nagatani (98), Olivia Parker (137), Neal Slavin (76), and William Wegman (78). Among the others are Vicky Alexander & Ellen Brooks (8), Margaret Bourke-White (3), Dawoud Bey (23), Bill Burke (39), Nancy Burson (19), Harry Callahan (5), Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (26), Ellen Carey (39), William Christenberry (12), Larry Clark (1), Chuck Close (14), Alvin Langdon Coburn (32), John Coplans (1), Imogen Cunningham (14), John Divola (30), Harold Edgerton (29), Stephen Frailey (16), Robert Frank (6), Ralph Gibson (25), Milton Greene (34), Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (19), Richard Hamilton (2), Sally Mann (3), Mary Ellen Mark (35), Robert Mapplethorpe (12), Joel Meyerowitz (5), Duane Michals (16), Robert Miller (3), Sarah Moon (8), Hans Namuth (8), Arnold Newman (39), Helmut Newton (8), Bill Owens (31), Eliot Porter (15), Robert Rauschenberg (10), Bettina Rheims (3), Lucas Samaras (22), Jan Saudek (7), Victor Schrager (11), Andres Serrano (6), Stephen Shore (10), Laurie Simmons (4), Lorna Simpson (13), Bert Stern (26), Larry Sultan (5), Deborah Turbeville (7), Andy Warhol (13), Carrie Mae Weems (16), Minor White (34) and Joel-Peter Witkin (1). [Note: Some 200 of the works in the collection by older photographers — Coburn, Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, Edward Weston — are not Polaroids. Ansel Adams advised Edwin Land, Polaroid’s guiding genius, to acquire a selection of classic gelatin-silver prints by masters of interpretive printmaking to serve as benchmarks against which to measure results obtained by himself and others using Polaroid materials. These almost certainly were purchased outright; if so, they belong, unencumbered, to the present holders of the collection.]
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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.
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Where Are the Missing 8000 Pieces from the Polaroid Collection?
Tom Petters mug shot, October 2008
U.S. v. Thomas Joseph Petters, 08-00364, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota (St. Paul) has run its course (at least pre-appeal, already announced). On Wednesday, December 2, after deliberating over a five-day stretch, a federal jury found Minnesota businessman Tom Petters guilty of masterminding a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 52-year-old founder of Petters Group Worldwide Inc. (PGW) — which once controlled the Polaroid Corp., among other businesses, and owned its now-imperiled photo collection — was convicted on all 20 counts of the indictment, including wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering. He faces life in prison without parole. (See the Wall Street Journal report by Susan Carey, “Petters Found Guilty of Fraud,” and the Boston Herald story, “Polaroid’s buyer found guilty in $3.7B Ponzi scheme.”)
Though potential future cellmate Bernie Madoff makes him look like a piker, Petters stands convicted of a massive scam. It’s his building the 2002 post-bankruptcy 1 Polaroid Corporation into his PGW pyramid that, as the scheme unraveled, drove that company into bankruptcy 2 in 2008. However, I should point out that another case, filed in Chicago Federal Court on November 23 by Ritchie Capital Management, argues that the bankruptcy was unnecessary and preventable, yet another scam. (See Bridget Freeland’s Nov. 23, 2009 report, “Tangle Increases as Petters Trial Ends,” from Courthouse News Service. Can you say “byzantine,” boys and girls?)
Be that as it may, Polaroid did plunge into a second bankruptcy, this time in Minneapolis. And this, in turn, generated the “Perils of the Polaroid Collection” cliffhanger we’ve now watched for much of 2009, with this nonpareil assemblage of one-of-a-kind works tied to the tracks and the locomotive of a pending Sotheby’s auction coming round the bend. (For my coverage of this debacle in this blog, click here.)
So no one in the photo/art world, including me, has any reason to wish Tom Petters well, or to speak up in his defense — with one possible exception: The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis benefitted from his largesse while he was riding high. He also gave away a lot of other loot (though not much more in the arts), so he did well by some along the way. But he has brought the extraordinary Polaroid Collection to the brink of destruction as a coherent entity, which I consider unforgivable. I’ll take the prosecution’s word, apparently quite persuasive to the jury, that Petters did everything of which they accused him, and possibly even more.
With that said, it seems highly unlikely to me that Petters personally made off with 6000-8000 prints from the Polaroid Collection, or authorized anyone else to do so. I assume that if any evidence to that effect had turned up during the gummint’s thorough investigation of his misdeeds, they’d gladly have added that charge to the bill of particulars. So here’s the question: If Tom Petters doesn’t have those prints, who does — and where are they now?
I’ve used the dates given above as timeline markers for the following reasons:
Polaroid Camera, 1960s wood prototype
That’s more than a minor shortfall. Somehow, between early 2003 and early 2009, one-third of the Polaroid Collection, some 6000-8000 items, went astray. Where are they?
Part 1 of 1 | 2
•
For those coming in late to these reports and inquiries regarding the fate of this unparalleled collection, here’s a sampling of photographers the collection includes, and how many prints by each of them it contains: Ansel Adams (627 photos), Paul Caponigro (671), Barbara Crane (103), Wendy Ewald (139), Philippe Halsman (198), Yousuf Karsh (136), Barbara Kasten (79), David Levinthal (59), Patrick Nagatani (98), Olivia Parker (137), Neal Slavin (76), and William Wegman (78). Among the others are Vicky Alexander & Ellen Brooks (8), Margaret Bourke-White (3), Dawoud Bey (23), Bill Burke (39), Nancy Burson (19), Harry Callahan (5), Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (26), Ellen Carey (39), William Christenberry (12), Larry Clark (1), Chuck Close (14), Alvin Langdon Coburn (32), John Coplans (1), Imogen Cunningham (14), John Divola (30), Harold Edgerton (29), Stephen Frailey (16), Robert Frank (6), Ralph Gibson (25), Milton Greene (34), Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (19), Richard Hamilton (2), Sally Mann (3), Mary Ellen Mark (35), Robert Mapplethorpe (12), Joel Meyerowitz (5), Duane Michals (16), Robert Miller (3), Sarah Moon (8), Hans Namuth (8), Arnold Newman (39), Helmut Newton (8), Bill Owens (31), Eliot Porter (15), Robert Rauschenberg (10), Bettina Rheims (3), Lucas Samaras (22), Jan Saudek (7), Victor Schrager (11), Andres Serrano (6), Stephen Shore (10), Laurie Simmons (4), Lorna Simpson (13), Bert Stern (26), Larry Sultan (5), Deborah Turbeville (7), Andy Warhol (13), Carrie Mae Weems (16), Minor White (34) and Joel-Peter Witkin (1). [Note: Some 200 of the works in the collection by older photographers — Coburn, Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, Edward Weston — are not Polaroids. Ansel Adams advised Edwin Land, Polaroid’s guiding genius, to acquire a selection of classic gelatin-silver prints by masters of interpretive printmaking to serve as benchmarks against which to measure results obtained by himself and others using Polaroid materials. These almost certainly were purchased outright; if so, they belong, unencumbered, to the present holders of the collection.]
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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.