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PHOTOGRAPHY SURVEYS | COLLECTIONS | MOVEMENTS | EXHIBITIONS

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 12.5 in. / 192 pgs / 230 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 73   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775732215 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CAD $70.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA LA

THE FALL 2025 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog Cover Link
Preview our FALL 2025 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

HATJE CANTZ

From Polaroid to Impossible

Masterpieces of Instant Photography, The WestLicht Collection

Edited by Achim Heine, Ulrike Willingmann, Rebekka Reuter. Text by Barbara P. Hitchcock, Florian Kaps.

From Polaroid to ImpossibleIn the late 1960s, Polaroid Corporation founder Edwin Land initiated a project to invite more than 800 artists around the world to shoot on Polaroid film, supplying them with the company's latest products. Over the ensuing decades, more than 4,500 works, by photographers ranging from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol, were presented to the company and found their way into Polaroid's International Collection at their European headquarters near Frankfurt am Main. In 2008 Polaroid went bankrupt. The company was bought by the Impossible Project (who promptly invented a new kind of instant film at the Polaroid factory in Enschede) and its legendary collection was acquired by the Westlicht Schauplatz museum in Vienna. From Polaroid to Impossible celebrates both this acquisition and the launch of a new Polaroid collection spearheaded by Westlicht and the Impossible Project. It offers the first overview of the European Polaroid Collection, and includes selected Polaroid masterpieces by figures such as Ansel Adams, Barbara Crane, Giselle Freund, Gottfried Helnwein, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Stephen Shore, Aaron Siskind, Andy Warhol, William Wegman and Minor White; artists like Miyako Ishiuchi, Andreas Mahl and Catherine Wagner, who made specialties of the medium; plus newly commissioned Impossible instant photography by contemporary artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki, David Leventhal, Mary Ellen Mark and Stefanie Schneider. Numerous images are reproduced in full color at 1:1 scale, making this volume a luscious and giftworthy celebration of the charm of the Polaroid photograph.

Featured image is Cinema II, detail from the image Alamogordo blues, 1986, by Patrick Nagatani. It is reproduced from From Polaroid to Impossible.

From Polaroid to Impossible

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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