Polaroid Collection: Update 11

Where Are the Missing 8000 Pieces from the Polaroid Collection? (continued)

As I pointed out in my previous post, somehow, between early 2003 and early 2009, one-third of the Polaroid Collection, some 6000-8000 items, went astray. That’s more than a minor shortfall, or a glitch in the inventory process. Where are they?

Polaroid Big Shot, 1971-73

A few partial answers propose themselves:

I have it on good authority that, upon the dissolution of the original Polaroid Corporation, assorted executives ended up (inadvertently, I’m sure) packing the original prints from the collection that decorated their office walls in with their personal effects and papers and taking them home. That’s to be expected, if not endorsed, and it surely accounts for some of the “shrinkage” the collection underwent.

Amplifying that scenario, aggravating the situation, and perhaps explaining the fate of some more of the disappeared works, the outcome of the initial 2002 bankruptcy proceeding had stiffed a considerable number of ex-employees, all at once. “The company has had sweeping layoffs and has discontinued some severance payments. And three days before its filing, it terminated retiree health benefits,” according to Kris Frieswick’s January 1, 2003 summary for CFO Magazine, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? Polaroid’s passage through Chapter 11 exposes how bankruptcy can give debtors too much power.” A large cohort of disgruntled, pink-slipped personnel, abruptly stripped of severance pay, retirement benefits, and other protections, might well decide to augment their radically slimmed termination packages with a few choice pieces of art each as supplementary compensation.

But 6000-8000 pieces? That’s not just some upper-echelon employees walking off with a few souvenirs from the offices. Nor is it middle-management and staff voting themselves an informal Christmas bonus. That’s wholesale looting. Keep in mind that the Polaroid Collection wasn’t just strewn around headquarters in open boxes, free for the taking. It was housed (so we have been told) in a secure, state-of-the-art facility in Waltham, MA, under the supervision of curator Barbara Hitchcock. (That building, and the parcel of land on which it sits, has since been sold, with the future undetermined for something else at the site. The collection is presently in storage in Somerville, MA, with Hitchcock an independent consultant thereto.)

Let’s now take a few steps back, to sketch a timeline of Polaroid’s accounting for and inventory of the collection:

• In 1988, Andrew Eskind and the other editors of the second enlarged edition of the compilation International Photography: Index to Photographers, Collections, and Exhibitions asked Polaroid for a new list of its holdings. The “updated” listing returned to them included “the Polaroid Collection, the Polaroid Corporate Archives and a portion of the Polaroid International Collection,” according to Carol Buchman. (Buchman was Assistant to the Director of the Clarence Kennedy Gallery, Linda Benedict-Jones; that was where the collection was housed at the time.) This listing gave no indication of the number of prints by each photographer, simply using the # sign after a name to indicate that the holdings were “substantial.” The published directory in that 1990 edition lists, by my count, 369 names; here they are, as they appear in its pages.
• In 1993, Andrew Eskind and the other editors of the second enlarged edition of the compilation International Photography: Index to Photographers, Collections, and Exhibitions asked Polaroid for an updated listing of its holdings. What they received from Barbara Hitchcock, who had become the director of the collection, was apparently nothing new; it’s the same list of 369 names. Here they are, as they appear in the pages of the 1995 edition.
• In 1998, Barbara Hitchcock, then curator of the Polaroid Collection, supplied a listing of 451 photographers in the Polaroid Collection for the final print edition of International Photography: Index to Photographers, Collections, and Exhibitions published that year by GK Hall. For motives on which I won’t speculate, Polaroid and its counsel withheld that document from the Delaware Bankruptcy Court during the 2002 proceedings, though it would have been easy enough to provide it as evidence of the company’s ongoing inventorying process. Whatever the reasons for keeping it from the court, the list includes the photographers’ names but not the specific number of prints acquired from them for the collection.
• The published estimates of the collection’s size run consistently between 20,000 and 24,000 from the late 1990s through at least 2006. For example, Jonathan Jones, writing for The Guardian (UK) on October 22, 2001, pegs it at “some 20,000 works” in his article “Gone in a flash.” (Jones gives no indication of the source of this figure. Perhaps he was fulfilling the British mandate for conservativism in keeping his figure low.)
• In the article “Instant Culture for Sale,” published on January 6, 2002 by the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Reynolds quotes Hitchcock as saying, “We think we have somewhere in the vicinity of 24,000 photos.” (This excellent piece includes a wealth of information, and is one of the earliest to inquire into the fate of the collection as a result of the original bankruptcy proceedings.)
• Hitchcock confirmed this estimate yet again in “After Images: With Polaroid in Bankruptcy, Its Remarkable Collection of Photography is in Jeopardy,” a March 10, 2002 feature in the Boston Globe by Christine Temin. Hitchcock reiterates the 24,000 figure “by more than 1,000 artists” here. The article also quotes William Wegman, “who was shocked to learn that the 20 or so of his works in the collection might go elsewhere. ‘We were told they would never be sold,’ says Wegman, who, however, has nothing to that effect in writing. ‘Who would have thought that the company would be in such bad shape? This is disturbing because it’s breaking a promise,’ he adds.” The article indicates that at that point Christie’s was angling for the right to auction the collection. (Sotheby’s would eventually beat them out for the dubious honor.) Temin also reports on the inventorying process: “Cataloging at Polaroid, says Hitchcock, ‘has been a project with too many cooks. There are errors in data, lapses in documentation, objects with the same accession numbers.’ There’s no complete inventory. There have been thefts and disappearances of works out on loan. There’s still a file card system in place. Work on a database halted at the end of September [2001], when Hitchcock lost her three part-time paid interns.” [Note: This article is online at the Boston Globe site and elsewhere, but available only by subscription.]


American Perspectives, 2000

• A fall 2002 press release from the Boston University Art Gallery concerning their November 22, 2002-January 26, 2003 showing of “American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection,” an exhibition curated in 2000 by Michiko Kasahara of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, describes it as “a cross-section of the historic 23,000-item Polaroid collection.” Presumably these estimates all base themselves on figures given out by Polaroid itself.
• Mark Feeney’s Boston Globe review of the “American Perspectives” show, “Instant Gratification,” published on November 22, 2002, includes the following: “As for its 23,000-photograph Polaroid Collection, ‘we are going to keep it intact, and it will remain part of Polaroid for the foreseeable future,’ says company vice-president Jim Landrigan.” Assurances such as these certainly helped to lull the photo/art community into a mistaken sense of confidence that no action was needed from those with work in the collection to protect their ongoing rights to access to their works. [Note: This article is also online at the Boston Globe site and elsewhere, but available only by subscription.]



• More recently, here’s the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Volume 1 (A-F), edited by Lynne Warren (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 338: “The two separate collections [U.S. and International] were combined in 1990 and the complete collection now holds more than 23,000 images by over 1,000 different artists.” (From the chapter “Corporate Collections,” by noted appraiser Penelope Dixon.)
• In May 2007, MassArtGuide published “Instantly Collectible: The Polaroid Collection” by Monika Burman, an interview with Hitchcock in which she gave no estimate of the collection’s size but claimed that it included “over 1500 artists.”
• Somehow, then, between her 1998 list of photographers in the collection and her 2007 interview, Hitchcock’s estimate of the number of photographers represented therein tripled, from 451 in ‘98 to “over 1500″ in ‘07. That’s a startling jump in itself. Meanwhile, however, the number of works in the collection diminished dramatically during that same period, from Polaroid’s own estimate of “in excess of 24,000 items” in 2002, reiterated as recently as 2006, to its internal inventory of just under 16,000 as of spring 2009 — reduced by a third.

How could any of this get verified? As previously reported here, according to Manfred Heiting, who directed the International Polaroid Collection from 1972-82, all documentation of the International Collection has ceased to exist. After Polaroid closed down the International Collection and Heiting was no longer in charge, he told me, the corporation authorized the disposal of all files relating to the approximately 5000 works contained therein. This means that the only documentation of the Polaroid Corporation’s arrangements with the makers of those works acquired for the International Collection is whatever now remains in the makers’ hands.

The Polaroid Book, Taschen, 2005

The two collections, U.S. and International, were then “merged,” which appears to have meant that some went on long-term loan to the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; some, on the same terms, went to La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, France; and some returned to the stateside archive. Those lent to La Maison Européenne de la Photographie have apparently been retrieved, while the Musée de l’Elysée (last I heard) anticipates a demand for the return of what they’ve held. Both those institutions certainly have documentation of what Polaroid deposited with them, though that likely doesn’t include any substantive accounting of those works’ original provenance and entry into the Polaroid International Collction.

But apparently these prints from the International Collection — between 4000 and 5000 of them — have already gotten factored into the almost 16,000 prints itemized by the vestigial Polaroid Corporation in the inventory presented to the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court as the basis for the projected spring 2010 auction at Sotheby’s; they do not represent the missing balance of the collection.

Presumably (though not assuredly), Polaroid has not cavalierly tossed all of the documentation in the files of the U.S. division related to the deposit of works in the U.S. collection. If relatively intact, those files should contain contracts, letters of agreement, correspondence, and other traces of the collection’s relationship to the photographers whose works built it.

Additionally, in October 2006, Polaroid donated its corporate archives to the Harvard Business School Baker Library (HBS). These archives include various kinds of images, but are separate from the Polaroid Collection — although it seems certain that these archives contain documents relating to the collection.

In short, there are sources — beyond what exists within and can be retrieved from the files of the individual photographers involved — for information about the specific ways in which prints entered the Polaroid Collection(s) and the terms under which the company obtained and made use of them. I think it is incumbent on the Polaroid Corporation to answer some increasingly urgent questions. To wit:

1. How does the Polaroid Corporation account for the discrepancy between the repeated estimate of 22,000-24,000 prints in the collection, given out by the Polaroid Corporation as recently as summer 2009, and the official inventory of 16,000 presented to the Minnesota court in spring 2009?
2. Can the Polaroid Corporation verify its actual acquisition and legal ownership of all the works it claims as its outright property in the Polaroid Collection, above and beyond authorization from the courts to sell them?

Given the questions that have arisen, I also certainly think it behooves Sotheby’s to take part in an investigation of the sellers’ bona fides in this situation, so as to assure prospective buyers that anything they purchase at the planned June 2010 sell-off will come with clear provenance and without either actionable encumbrances or the embarrassing ethical baggage of a trail of breach of contract (even if endorsed by negligent bankruptcy courts).

Note: At the urging of George H. Singer of the Minneapolis law firm Lindqvist & Vennum, legal counsel to John R. Stoebner, the court-appointed Chapter 7 Trustee in the PBE Corporation bankruptcy proceeding, I hereby revise the above passage as indicated by the strikethrough, and retract the parenthetical phrase “(even if endorsed by negligent bankruptcy courts).”

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