The Part You Throw Away: ALT Polaroid Show soon!

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Diana

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Apr 19, 2006, 9:42:59 PM4/19/06

to Forest Art & Poetry

The Part You Throw Away
Alternative-Process Polaroid Photography
by John Beaver and Teresa Saska
Opening July 1, 2006 at the Ohio Art League
Gallery in Columbus, Ohio

Photography allows the light of the world to make
marks on pieces of paper. There is a bitter
poignancy in the interplay between the fleeting
transience of the living subject in the world and
the permanent flatness of a photographic object.
And so The Part You Throw Away sees the
photographic object as self-aware of the process
by which it was made, highlighting techniques
that somehow leave their direct marks on the
print.

The images in The Part You Throw Away are
printed with a digital technology that prides itself
upon its reproducibility; an infinite number of
prints can be made that are identical even at the
microscopic level. But this same perfect
reproducibility threatens a crisis in a
photographic art that naively aligns itself with
traditional printmaking. What does a limited
edition mean when every bit of microscopic detail
of the final print is stored somewhere on an
optical disc?

And so with The Part You Throw Away we place
the focus back on the original interplay between
light and the light sensitive emulsion; here the
print is just a way to see what happened. We
use Polaroid, the most fleeting of photographic
processes, to arrive at images rich with happy
accidents, but for which it would have been
impossible to make prints without modern digital
techniques.

Many of the images are formed by scanning the
"negative" side of peel-apart Polaroid film. And
so the part you would normally throw away is the
ultimate source of the image, and the Polaroid
print itself is discarded. The paper negative is
often scanned wet, within a very short time of the
original exposure, and the scanning process
permanently destroys the negative. The virtual is
all that is left.

Polaroid, and perhaps all film, is fleeting in a
different way. Polaroid recently announced it is
permanently discontinuing an important type
(used, for example, for Cathedral) of peel-apart
film, and no other company makes it or plans to
in the future. With The Part You Throw Away we
celebrate the rich textures and solarized, strange
accidents that inevitably arise when pulling an
image off of the part of the film Polaroid meant
for you to discard. Digital is killing film, but
without it most of the images in The Part You
Throw Away could not exist. It is often the very
end of something that allows one to see it for the
first time.