thelast-magazine.comDIEGO UCHITEL'S POLAROIDS
by Bradley Donnelly
Disposable film plays a conflicted role in a time when nostalgia doubles as an emotion and a costly æsthetic. For those of us who came to consciousness in a digital world, tinkering as children with film but moving eventually to memory cards, it’s a medium for exploration, serving not so much as a reflection on a less-interconnected era—an experience saved for the generation that precedes us—but instead a trial with spontaneity, a release from quality control.
Diego Uchitel’s Polaroids, released late last year by Damiani, shares work that exists somewhere in the middle space. As a result, it excels as an exposé on process, a viewpoint that requires we look beyond ruggedness as just another artistic effect. On the surface level, the interpretation is literal—the images, upheld by tape, carry scratches, fingerprints, and notes in thick black marker, highlighting the film’s utilitarian purpose. The subjects, famous and beautiful, are similarly—and more unexpectedly—strung out for display.
The book, which spans across twenty-five years, is divided into three chapters—”More Than Fashion,” “Familiar Faces,” and “Body Poetry”—and carries a consistent, albeit muted, visual style throughout, which results from a Polaroid’s limited color spectrum. Where celebrity is involved, the outcome is particularly emotive; these are the subjects whose display is rarely so unrefined. The result is humanizing; the more well-known subjects have shed their seemingly-automated perfection while maintaining—or sharing, finally—their character.
Sofia Coppola, Diana Vreeland, David Bowie, Zooey Deschanel, Jason Schwartzman, and Donna Karan are just drops in a well of highlights. But where namebrand recognition is stripped away, the artist-subject relationship truly excels: principal ballerina Janie Taylor in motion, caught somewhere between movement and pose; New York’s Cedar Lake dancers cast against a black backdrop, afloat near the top of a bottomless frame; model Iselin Steiro shooting dozens of wild-haired frames, arching and cowering, in a series of faded studio portraits.
In the end, it’s not hard to imagine that the publication of a single image from a shoot—wherever that may have been, be it Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, or a campaign—resulted in a subdued conclusion for Uchitel. The photographer, who began his career in Buenos Aires, where he photographed his father’s medical patients, is at his best when the relationship portrayed is not that of the subject to society but that of the photographer to his subject, which all the more lends itself to the book being a study on the Uchitel’s approach. In this, Polaroids succeeds where many similar publications fail, choosing not to mask the method but instead celebrate it.
Diego Uchitel’s Polaroids is out now from Damiani.


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