there seems to be a flood of Polaroid books in recent years, and I personally, have been lowering my threshold of what is a good book to buy. it is not a “pass”, rather, it has to do with an attempt to understand a distortion/transformation (or two). that is, there is the transformation that Polaroids shifts in color relative to the real world, and there is the transformation on the photographer/subject by using the Polaroid equipment. among the early books, themed on Polaroids, that I obtained was from Sibylle Bergemann. I watched the video-review (by Jörg Coldberg), and was hooked— and no, it didn’t require for me to lower my threshold on photo books that I would own. I am glad to see that more of her work is being given a book release, as her talent, demonstrated in The Polaroids, gets an immediate spark of interest on how she saw the world. further to this interest, and despite the fact that I have not taken that many Polaroid photos because I completely avoided it when the company was viable— heck, I even worked a summer at Polaroid near Boston and was not interested in the camera— then, it is strange how much it influences my perception of color in presenting a photo… and perhaps, if I get to understand the second transformation: what a portrait should convey.

link: more photos at Luz. an essay on Polaroids I wrote a few years ago:
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