The Infinite Instant: The Polaroids of Luigi Ghirri and Robby Müller
By Sophie Fox
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SOME ARTISTS SHOULD never size up. The patterned density of Édouard Vuillard’s interiors turns decorative on a larger scale, becoming mere Nabi ornamentation in his screens and panels. Tomma Abts’s few attempts to extend the uniform proportions of her highly worked abstract paintings by mere increments have diminished their richness. Hence my trepidation before a visit to the recent exhibition of large Polaroids by Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) at the Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, the first institutional showing of these works. By greatly expanding the dimensions of his images, with their muted palettes, tight cropping, found symmetries, and laconic wit, had the maestro of the photographic epigram betrayed his subtractive aesthetic?
The odd conditions of the Pecci visit magnified my misgivings. A pianist was rehearsing one of Liszt’s more unyielding pieces for a matinee performance, providing a thunderous accompaniment unavoidable in the center’s circular space. Everything felt loud and inordinate; my initial apprehension was confirmed by the exhibition’s installation design. Ghirri’s oversize Polaroids, which increased the usual scale of his modest images to roughly tabloid size, were mounted on hefty support columns clad in coir, a jute-like material used for doormats, obviously intended to thwart any suggestion of monumentality. Given the dramatic manner in which the hulking piers marched down the center of the institution’s narrow corridor, flanked by the photographer’s three-inch-square Polaroids, hung as if in awed supplication, the effect verged on hyperbole, the gnomic ceding to the grandiose.
“I’ve never traveled all that far,” Ghirri maintains in the first sentence of his 2016 essay collection, and in another text he jokes that he preferred taking voyages either by perusing atlases or in “minimal Sunday outings . . . within a range of three kilometers from my home.” That geographical restriction is reflected in the unassuming titles of many of his most celebrated images, named simply after his adopted hometown of Modena, Italy (he was born in Scandiano), and nearby destinations (including Rimini and Ravenna), though he did travel throughout his native country and visited France and Germany. In 1980 and ’81, Ghirri was lured to Amsterdam, invited by the Polaroid company to experiment with its 20×24 Land Camera, a monstrous version of the then-ubiquitous SX-70 folding model. The Land Camera weighed more than two hundred pounds and required technicians to operate. The project posed several issues for an artist who had always emphasized clarity and simplicity in his solitary picture-taking. In a 1970 essay titled “Photographs from My Early Years,” he declares that he “stand[s] squarely in front of my subject to avoid any kinds of slants or vanishing points, cuts or leaks,” develops his photographs in “normal laboratories,” and avoids “visual enhancements” of any sort. By shooting in a studio on enormous rolls, employing props that he brought from home in a suitcase and staging the image, Ghirri appeared to be undertaking an endeavor antithetical, even inimical, to his rigorous tenets.
As it turned out, Ghirri’s 1980–81 Amsterdam experiments both liberated and constrained him. The first image in the exhibition announced the playful tenor of the oversize works, which often verged on the ludic despite the lack of spontaneity owing to the cumbersome Land Camera. In a burst of primary color and trompe l’oeil trickery, five dice—red, yellow, blue, green, white—are suspended against a maroon field densely latticed with dice shapes, the cubes appearing simultaneously to lie stationary on its pip-stippled surface and to tumble downward through space. By choosing this image to introduce the exhibition, the curators implied that what lay ahead was unusually mischievous and elaborately fabricated for a creator whose Conceptualism had hitherto remained reticent and unmediated, even at its most droll—consider Marina di Ravenna, 1972, a C-print that features a furled red beach umbrella flaunting its windblown fringe, or another 1972 picture of a billboard in the Swiss town of Engelberg featuring a massive bottle of Sprite, the actual Alpine background in the image’s upper quarter semiotically subsumed into the advertisement’s fake waterfall. (The billboard recalls Ghirri’s admiration for William Eggleston, whose recent exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, “The Last Dyes,” affirmed their mutual affinity.)
The Amsterdam Polaroids extended Ghirri’s penchant for quotidian surrealism with some strenuous amalgams.
Ghirri dubbed his series of contemporaneous photographs of amusement parks “The Land of Toys” in which “‘everyday’ dimension disappears,” he said, “and where we may embark on a journey in a realm where reality has been doubled, where scale fluctuates and the past is reconstructed. In short, we are in a fantasy, fairyland landscape.” The Amsterdam pictures shared a border with this fanciful domain, an adjacent “land of toys” featuring a mesh net suspended against one of Ghirri’s signature cirrus-streaked skies bulging with miniature play houses, figurines, and a tiny windmill; a polychrome pull-toy parrot resting on a coloring-book page with renderings of drawing instruments; and those gaudy dice, which reappear as an image inside an open notepad. The “fairyland landscape” also resurfaces in a tableau of a little comic-book girl, her back turned to us as she peers into a dark lagoon where swans float serenely under the dimly lit battlements of a sinister castle.
The Amsterdam Polaroids extended Ghirri’s penchant for quotidian surrealism with some strenuous amalgams. His many photographs of classical statuary, including the five small Polaroids of sculpted Roman heads in this exhibition (all titled Roma, 1979), shot from behind in an act of witty deflation, prepared the way for a fantastical jape: a photo of a drawing of a female statue, arm raised in alarm or self-protection, whose body deliquesces into a cartoonish contrapposto of two ribbony legs puddling in hapless high heels (Amsterdam, 1981). In another Amsterdam photo, a pair of identical world globes, recalling Ghirri’s passion for cartography and atlases, rest on matching supports to conjure that oldest of surrealist tropes, a pair of staring eyes.
Ghirri’s essays teem with allusions to art history, and two of the more striking large Polaroids invoked paintings by the artist’s favorite old masters, though the homages inclined less toward reverence than tart irony. Antonello da Messina’s painting Virgin Annunciate, ca. 1475–76, stares out from behind an imprisoning grid. Da Messina’s Annunciation famously excises the angel Gabriel, while Ghirri’s version further edits the event by also obscuring the Virgin herself. Another work features a severely cropped picture of Rembrandt’s face, taken from a 1629 self-portrait by the artist, inside a 35-mm slide resting on a page in an open booklet. On the recto is the full self-portrait, its face obliterated by the forceful insert of another Rembrandt image.
“I’ve photographed a lot of people from behind,” Ghirri once acknowledged, the fact placing him in the company of painters Gustave Caillebotte and Vilhelm Hammershøi. If a single image from the exhibition deserved pantheon status, it was that of a shallow-focus portrait of a woman’s head from 1980, captured closely from the back in a Modena street. The tightly cropped chromatic study harmonized peach (a broom leaning against a wall to the woman’s right), persimmon (her intricately patterned piqué dress), auburn (her voluminous hair), and faded ocher (the surrounding architecture). A smear of discordant crimson—whose source is unidentifiably buried in the blurred background, though it appears to be a street sign—initially refuses the photograph’s saffron schema, but then decides to complete it by nestling with a streak of palest golden orange. Despite its unnerving intimacy, which suggests either erotic pursuit or familiar proximity, the diminutive print calls to mind the photos of Saul Leiter, a figure surprisingly unmentioned in Ghirri’s essays despite his frequent fond allusions to American street photography.
GHIRRI’S SOJOURN in Amsterdam was part of Polaroid’s Artist Support Program, envisioned by the camera company’s cofounder Edwin H. Land, who informally offered equipment and film to promiscuous shutterbugs David Hockney and Andy Warhol in the ’70s, and eventually developed the ASP initiative to encourage dozens of artists to use the instant camera for aesthetic experiments. Many of these recruits, including Chuck Close and Sarah Moon, were then expected to donate some of the resulting works to the Polaroid Collection. In the early ’70s, an agent from Polaroid arrived at New York’s Excelsior Hotel to bestow upon Wim Wenders and his Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller (1940–2018) foldable SX-70 cameras in the hopes that they would put them to innovative purpose. Both men were entranced by the new technology despite the occasional emulsion irregularities—or “dirty edges,” as Wenders called them—that appeared on the prints. The director would later produce a book of lovingly annotated Polaroids, Instant Stories (2017). In the middle of this volume is a close-up portrait of Müller, whom Wenders calls “some kind of twin brother to me.” The subject’s folded hands, flowing hair, and absorbed sidelong expression in the severely condensed space of the photo are reminiscent of a Hans Memling youth.
That same musing portrait provides the final page of a handsomely designed volume of Müller’s own Polaroids, which he shot during the mid-’80s in Los Angeles with an SLR-680 while filming William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and other movies. The book, L.A. Polaroids (2025), was assembled by his widow, art historian Andrea Müller-Schirmer, who has organized many exhibitions of his Polaroids in galleries and photography festivals. It appears at a moment when vintage Polaroid cameras enjoy fetish status among pre-digital nostalgists, their heft and tactility a rebuke to the weightless world of Instagram. The more unwieldy the analog apparatus—the eight-track tape machine, the laser disc player, the chunky turntable—the more it is valued as an embodiment of the authentic.
Wim Wenders characterizes Robby Müller’s photographs as “crisp and shiny,” but they are neither.
Having no driver’s license, Müller became a Polaroid-toting expeditionist, returning repeatedly to his beloved Kensington Motel in Santa Monica and its environs. Ghirri would likely recognize in the LA Polaroids—shot with the same emphasis on natural light that made Müller a revered cinematographer—a kindred adherent of the instant image whose compositions similarly conflate the vernacular and the abstract. Both photographers transform trees into arboreal personae through intent perusal and framing, deploy cars less as signifiers than as compositional forms, and relish discovering architectural oddities. The cinematographer’s wit is less cerebral, more overt: A pair of domestic interiors shot in raking light slashed by venetian blind shadows are parodically noir, as if captured in Mildred Pierce’s kitchen.
In the book, Wenders characterizes Müller’s photographs as “crisp and shiny,” but they are neither. Most are soft; some are veiled by haze or sea mist, and others employ blur to picturesque ends. A monochrome of a sky feathered by wispy clouds reflected in the ocean with a thin strand of sand dividing the two starts out as an Impressionistic triptych and finishes by anticipating Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes. The prevailing aura in Müller’s Polaroids is of dreamy recall. It has long been a commonplace that outsiders, particularly Europeans, get smoggy, car-clogged LA and its low-slung architecture better than do the locals—Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Demy, and Jacques Deray offer cinematic evidence of this. Müller joins their ranks with these affectionate images.
Polaroid’s Land called photography “a second memory,” though the instantaneousness of his invention contradicts Proust’s every metaphor relating photography to remembrance, particularly the metaphysical one, in which the “negative” collected during a social event is later processed in solitary seclusion, in the “inner darkroom” of the mind. The immediacy of Polaroid picture-making—which so enthralled Müller that he catalogued over two thousand such images—sensorially associated with the lingering whiff of fixative as the picture emerges before one’s eyes, predicted the digital snapshot of our time, the memory machine at its most omnivorous. Decades before smartphones began consuming the world with such rude alacrity, rendering reality malleable and unverifiable, the ever-lucid Ghirri frequently inveighed against a surfeit of images, which, he cautioned, would inevitably lead to an “aphasia of seeing.” And here we are, lost in a blizzard of pixels.
James Quandt is a film critic and curator based in Toronto.
This article was originally published by Artforum.