094 http://www.AmericanArtCollector.com
UPCOMING SHOW PREVIEW / LOS ANGELES, CA
December 3-30, 2016Coagula Curatorial
974 Chung King Road | Los Angeles, CA 90012
(323) 480-7852 | http://www.coagulacuratorial.comT
here’s a romance that comes with a
Polaroid camera. For many people,
the boxy cameras—with their plastic frames
and retro appearance, and that mechanical
whirr-clunk of the ejecting picture—were
what captured their childhoods, one square,
now-yellowed image at a time. Today, the
cameras are kitschy links to the past,
curious novelties that perplex the iPhone
generation; or, alternatively, the camera of
choice for hipsters who brag about their
old-timey shaving kits and Smith Coronas.
Yes, Polaroid the company has seen better
days and is still fluctuating somewhere
between endangered and extinct, but a
number of artists are still using the instant
cameras to create mesmerizing one-of-
a-kind artwork that is transcending the
format nearly 70 years since its creation.
One such artist is Sarah Elise Abramson,
a Los Angeles photographer who has taken
the Polaroid camera and given it fresh lifeinside her evocative, cerebral and hauntingly
beautiful images. Her new show, Déjà Vu in
General, opening December 3 at Coagula
Curatorial in Los Angeles, will feature more
than 200 Polaroid images that she whittled
down from thousands of images she’s taken
over the last decade. “I learned photography
on an all-manual Minolta 35mm—I learned
depth of field, aperture, shutter speed, all
that. The next couple years I only shot
35mm until my parents bought me my
first Polaroid camera before Polaroid shut
down,” she says, adding that she quickly
branched out into new kinds of films and
photographic processes. “I was shooting on
600 [film], but then I got into Time Zero, this
really cool film that has this awesome blue
hue to it. It’s really rare now. Polaroid film is
so unpredictable, which is what I love about
it. Sometimes it’s a bummer when the image
doesn’t come out at all. But you end up really
appreciating the magic of the film.”Abramson gets her film from the Impossible
Project, a company that scooped up all of
Polaroid’s machinery and photographic
equipment when it went bust in 2008. They
are helping keeping the format alive, for
which the artist is grateful. “There’s such
an instant gratification to it,” she says. “It’s
awesome to watch the image appear. It
takes me back to being in the dark room.”
This show will mark a significant return for
Abramson, who was in an accident on the set
of a short film she was directing this summer.
“I fell from 15 feet up. Broke both kneecaps,
my left elbow, cracked my jaw, bit through
my bottom lip, chipped my tooth. It was
pretty bad,” she says. “Not being able to use a
camera was killing me. I get irritable if I can’t
shoot often enough. It’s a very meditative
experience for me. I just get into that zone
and I feel a huge relief come over me, like
I just did yoga or something. I realized then
that I’ll be shooting until the day I die.”
She’s all healed up and not wasting
any time getting back into the swing of
things. For Déjà Vu in General, she will be
showing the 200 Polaroid originals as well
as enlarged reproductions and a book with
the same title. Works in the show include
Astrid, featuring a nude female on a square
slab meant for cannons at a military fort,
and Brennan as a Daydream, which is
part of a photo collaboration with French
photographer Sarah Seené. Abramson
chose the word “daydream,” photographed
this picture, and then sent the word to
Seené to offer her own interpretation—a
photographic call and response. On the next
round, Seené chooses a word and Abramson
responds. They call it I’ll Be Your Mirror.
Abramson, who studied under the great
David LaChapelle—he has since called her
the future of photography—is excited to
show her work, but admits that she’s hesitant
to let her works go out into the world. After
all, Polaroids have no negatives. It’s not like
she can make new prints.
“These are my negatives. It’s my entire
body of work,” she says. “They’re like a part
of me.”SARAH ELISE ABRAMSONDéjà vu
1