Friends, Lovers, and Others, Reassembled
07/05/20
Francesco Dama, Rome, May 28, 2020
This introduction is excerpted from the book. For ordering information: stuartsandford.com
Over the past three years Stuart Sandford has been taking Polaroids, which he has then cut and re-assembled in new compositions. The resulting body of work, unequivocally entled Polaroid Collages, document the artist's social circle - his "friends, lovers & others," in his own words - in several locations between Los Angeles and Mexico. Stuart started working with an instant camera in 2007 and revisited the medium seven years later, when he first arrived in L.A. to do a residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation, a life-changing experience.
Taking a Polaroid finds a perfect equivalent in writing down a note: both actions share the same immediacy and respond to the same urgency of fixing an idea before it disappears. It's something that has to do with capturing a thought or an instant, clinging to a moment, in the awareness that we'll be able to go back to it, in the form of memories. Promises of a pleasure yet to come.
Indeed, the Polaroid Collages originate from the pleasure that comes from satisfying small desires: the desire to photograph, which is also, almost inevitably, the desire to look, to smell, to touch, to taste, to possess.
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