Polaroid Collection: Update 20

It’s Sunday morning on Father’s Day, June 20th, and I’m at home on Staten Island. I’ve had my breakfast, talked via Skype with my wife Anna and stepson Jacky in Shenzhen, China. Sitting in the sunroom off our kitchen, I’m poring over the handsome catalogue Sotheby’s has produced and published for the imminently forthcoming auction of the Polaroid Collection. That will start tomorrow evening, Monday, June 21, following six days of previews. The auction will have four sessions: the first tomorrow, starting at 5 p.m., the remaining three on Tuesday, June 22.

I hope it goes well — for the sake of Sotheby’s; for the sake of the creditors on whose behalf Trustee John R. Stoebner obtained the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court’s permission to hold the auction; and, most of all, for the market for photography. Poor results would serve no one’s interest, including mine. Indeed, I’d be delighted to see this sale set new records for some of the photographers involved — not at all unlikely, even in a recession, because many of the works are prime and the Polaroid pieces among them are, by definition, one of a kind. (Note: This auction contains a substantial number of non-Polaroid gelatin-silver prints by Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, and others that the original Polaroid Corporation acquired for its collection. Some of these are editioned prints, and others are prints of images known to exist in multiple prints. But some of them — like the Adams murals — are also unique.)

Andy Warhol, "Self-Portrait (Grimace)," 1979

By my count, the auction includes work by 72 photographers, if one includes the several members of such teams as Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. That’s a very small percentage of the roughly 1500 photographers in the collection as a whole. Sam Joyner, part of a team of attorneys for some of the photographers whose work is included in the auction, said yesterday that “the photographers’ concerns with the auction have been resolved, and it is hoped an institutional placement can be achieved for the balance of the Polaroid Collection.” From my standpoint, that settles the issues I’ve raised here over the past year, insofar as this auction goes.

The catalog meets Sotheby’s usual high standards for such publications. Its 480 pages don’t illustrate or annotate every image, since some of them will get sold as sizeable lots — 29 by Bill Owens, for example, and 17 by Mary Ellen Mark. All told, the 1260 images selected by Sotheby’s appear here as 485 lots. The catalogue contains extensive annotation of the illustrated images, and general description of the larger lots, with condition reports posted at Sotheby’s website. (Note: You’ll need to set up a “My Sotheby’s” online account in order to view those reports.) Accessible online now:

• An “E-catalogue” of the auction.
• A PDF of the introduction to the catalogue.
• A PDF of the Appendixes to the catalogue.
• For a promotional video of Sotheby’s photo specialists Denise Bethel and Chris Mahoney, plus photographer David Levinthal, discussing the Polaroid medium and the work in this auction, click here.

Robert Rauschenberg, "North Carolina (from the Bleacher series)," 1991

Certainly the information here in the printed version, carefully gathered by Sotheby’s team of experts, functions as a preliminary database for this portion of the total collection. Per my previous post on this subject, I hope that, along with the other institutions that have annotated chunks of the collection, Sotheby’s will see fit to contribute this information to a cumulative database. Hosted by some institution or other sponsor, that would constitute a virtual recreation of the complete Polaroid Collection, which, if put online, would enable ongoing research into the complete collection even with some of its original contents dispersed via this auction and inaccessible thereafter.

I plan to attend the last day of the preview, tomorrow morning, and the first session of the auction itself, that evening. Full auction reports and assessments are not among my skill sets, so I’ve invited Stephen Perloff — editor of The Photo Review and The Photograph Collector — to provide a thorough account, plus his expert analysis of the outcome, in a Guest Post. That will go up sometime next week.

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Helmut Newton, "Nude in Pumps," c.1975

Lee Rosenbaum, a/k/a CultureGrrl, has several posts about the Polaroid auction at her blog. Here they are, in sequence:

• “Polaroid Collection Dispersal: From Museum Exhibition to Presale Exhibition,” February 17, 2010.
• “MeTube: Sotheby’s Photography Head Discusses Controversy Over Polaroid Sale,” June 17, 2010. This includes a video of Denise Bethel fielding questions from Rosenbaum and NPR reporter Margot Adler about objections to the auction.
• “My NPR Soundbite: Polaroid Controversy on Tomorrow’s ‘Weekend Edition,'” June 19, 2010.

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And here’s Margot Adler’s own NPR audio piece on the auction, “What’s a Picture Worth? Polaroid Auctions Photos,” from the June 19th Weekend Edition. (Her title isn’t quite accurate. Neither “Old Polaroid” or “New Polaroid” is connected to this auction.) There’s also a text version of Adler’s piece.

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The entity I’ve taken to calling “New Polaroid” — PLR IP Holdings LLC, now owner of the Polaroid trademark and presently manufacturing Polaroid-branded goods — has donated “a collection of classic Polaroid products and prototype designs from its 73-year archive” to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, according to a May 5, 2010 story in the Boston Globe.

Deborah Douglas, curator of science and technology for the MIT Museum, is quoted as saying “Polaroid is a company that both shaped and was shaped by MIT. This collection is of major significance to the MIT Museum not only for its intrinsic technical and historical value, but also because of Edwin Land’s strong connections with MIT.” (Here’s a link to “Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science,” a remarkable lecture by Edwin Land given at MIT in 1957.) Douglas indicates that they expect to put some of the artifacts on view in June 2010.

This donation to MIT follows, by 3-1/2 years, the much larger donation of Polaroid-related materials to Harvard by Petters Group Worldwide, the corporate entity that just two years later would collapse upon revelation that its founder, Tom Petters, had created another shell company that functioned as a Ponzi scheme.

In “Polaroid Donates Corporate Archives to Harvard,” her story on that October 2006 gift for DigitalCameraInfo.com, Karen M. Cheung notes that “The Polaroid collection is the single largest collection at the Harvard Business School Library. If all the shelves that house the Polaroid archives were placed next to each other, the collection would measure 4000 linear feet, equivalent to over 13 football fields.”

Robert Mapplethorpe, "Ken Moody (with Palm Leaf)," ca. 1984

The just-announced donation to MIT by PLR IP Holdings LLC means that most of the existing documentation of the history of the original Polaroid Corporation (“Old Polaroid”) founded by Edwin Land has become safely archived in the Boston area. While some of this material undoubtedly relates to the creation, development, and promotion of the Polaroid Collection, it is not in itself (as I understand it) the documentation of that collection compiled by its successive curators. Various indications suggest that this archival material remains in storage with the bulk of the collection itself, somewhere in the Boston area, as John R. Stoebner, the Trustee appointed by the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court, pursues the disposition of the portion of the collection left over from Sotheby’s selection of works for the upcoming auction. Presumably that documentation would accompany the remainder of the collection to its new home or homes.

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Designer Paul Giambarba masterminded what he calls “The Branding of Polaroid” from 1957-77, including the Polaroid logos and other product aspects. Now he’s designing the packaging for the new SX-70-compatible instant films from The Impossible Project. His blog, “The Branding of Polaroid,” contains a wealth of information about Polaroid’s positioning of itself within visual culture. He writes pithily and wittily about the twenty-year project,  and pulls no punches in critiquing what he sees as the amateurishness of those who succeeded him in the role. To find these posts by title, go to his Archives page, then scroll about halfway down. Great stuff, and an important resource for anyone doing research on the company and its relationship to popular culture.

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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.