Polaroid art: a chance to own the iconic photographs of Andy Warhol and his contemporary Ulay

Sixty years before smartphones and Instagram, artists were using Polaroid cameras to take selfies or capture on-the-spot impressions from life that they could later incorporate into their art. Now those prints, considered no more than documentation at the time, can fetch serious amounts of money as works of art in their own right.

The first self-developing camera was made by Polaroid in 1948. By the late Seventies, the Polaroid Corporation was selling one billion dollars worth of cameras a year.

One of those fascinated by the technology was Andy Warhol, whose Polaroid photographs are the subject of an exhibition at Bastian, a new gallery opening in London next week.

Warhol was drawn to mechanical devices. “Machines have less problems,” he said, in a 1963 interview. “I’d like to be a machine. Wouldn’t you?”

At first, he used newspaper photographs as source material for his paintings. He then began making his own with a camera that he carried with him, providing a visual diary. His favourite camera was the Big Shot, developed by Polaroid specifically for taking portraits.

Gallery owner Aeneas Bastian estimates that Warhol took at least 700 Polaroids, beginning with his Factory entourage in the Sixties and branching out into the celebrity series of the Eighties.

Thankfully, he kept them carefully in boxes (Polaroids are over-sensitive to light, which makes them fade, meaning only well-stored prints survive in good condition).

Warhol often used them as studies for his portraits. Others were used for commercial purposes, such as the cover for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album in 1971.

The exhibition comprises 60 Polaroids, all acquired directly from the Andy Warhol Foundation. They include images of Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Yves Saint-Laurent, John Lennon, David Hockney, Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

At the centre of these standard-sized snaps, typically priced at £15,000 each, is a rare large Polaroid self-portrait taken with a special camera, priced at around £40,000.

An artist using Polaroids at the same time, but for a slightly different purpose, was Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), now in his mid-seventies. Ulay is best known as the former partner of the celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović, with whom he would undergo testing acts of endurance to reflect on the nature of the body and human relationships.

The two worked together between 1976 and 1988 but prior to that he had produced conceptual work, taking photographs of himself with a Polaroid camera. It was a technology he had become familiar with, having worked as a consultant for Polaroid.

Ulay’s Polaroids, some re-photographed recently for conservation purposes, are at the heart of a timely retrospective exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in Mayfair.

It’s timely because Ulay is only now being recognised as an artist in his own right. Most of the exhibition is devoted to his pre-Abramović years: fairly stark black and white self-portraits in a variety of guises, exploring gender issues or states of anxiety.

These works underpin his claim to be the inventor of performance photography. One series is from a performance (which was filmed) when he stole a painting by the 19th-century German artist Carl Spitzweg from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, then hung it in the home of a Turkish immigrant family.

By telephoning the museum director to tell him where the painting was, and ensuring a police presence, he was drawing attention to the plight of immigrants in Germany.

After his separation from Abramović, Ulay worked in near isolation – making performances and taking photographs, but without much critical acclaim. An institutional breakthrough came three years ago, when the Defares Collection in Amsterdam acquired 100 of his Polaroids for €500,000 (£442,000).

At Richard Saltoun, the end wall is hung with a free-floating image of Ulay’s latest performance.

Struggling with lymphatic cancer, the artist invited a small audience to extend their hands over his body as he lay curled up on the floor. The life-size image, taken from above in the manner of an X-ray, is both effective and moving.

Most of the standard-sized images in the exhibition are priced at €10,000 each, while the large ones, at 2.4m high (7ft 10in), are €120,000.

Unlike Ulay, Warhol didn’t live to see his Polaroids reach such significant values, though, being Warhol, he probably had a shrewd idea they would.

Andy Warhol Polaroid Pictures at BASTIAN, London, 2 February – 13 April 2019, galeriebastian.com

Ulay at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 11 January - 23 February, 2019, richardsaltoun.com

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