Lucas Samaras

The Pace Gallery, New York

cf. Samaras: The Photographs of Lucas Samaras (New York, 1987), p. 53

Marla Prather, Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003), p. 173-9 (variants)

In 1973, Polaroid employee John Holmes arranged for artist Lucas Samaras to receive one of the company's new SX-70 cameras. The result of years of research, the SX-70 was the realization of Polaroid founder Edwin Land's original impulse: to create a truly instant one-step camera that produced images in full color. The SX-70 in the hands of Samaras—whose career had already established its tone of fearless experimentation—became a powerful tool for transformation.

In his work with Polaroids, Samaras is his own subject: he performs as both photographer and sitter, using his body as an object to be explored, shaped, and often distorted, first through pose and then through manipulation of the medium. "For me, looking in the mirror produces a sense of wonder. . . ‘I say, “Who is that?” I look at my hand . . . and say “What is that?”" (Lucas Samaras, quoted in Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art, edited by Brooks Johnson, Aperture 2004, p. 286)

The unique properties of the SX-70 allowed Samaras to pursue this transformation in a wholly new way.  Within the multi-layer complex of the SX-70 print, the emulsion remained soft and malleable during, and even after, development. With colored gels intended for theatrical use, Samaras creates dramatic modulations and saturated passages of color, all enhanced by the Polacolor process. No less dramatic is the artist himself, who vamps suggestively for the camera.