Polaroids

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HGEsch Polaroids

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Plates in Duotone

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Burj al Arab, Dubai

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Bejing

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Hongkong

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Hongkong

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Sony Center, Berlin

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Bejing

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CGN, Kรถln/Bonn

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Text by Rolf Sachsse

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From Proof to Artwork Polaroid as study and final product in the work of HG Esch Summer 1968, secret commando action in the large atelier of the schmölz + huth photo studio in Cologne’s Meschenich district: A well-known upholstery manufacturer is having their new collection photographed, which is to be spectacularly presented at the next Cologne International Furniture Fair.

No pictures, no Polaroids may leave the atelier; everything is being collected by the company’s publicity manager because, along with the designs, the studio’s existence is at stake.

A new intern, selected by Walde Huth according to anthroposophical criteria – “I’m telling you, he is a good person” – is nosing around the trash cans where the negative papers pulled from the positive sides of the Polaroids are being thrown.

A comment made by the young apprentices to the master, that these sheets went missing, is dismissed as petty.

The photo shoot is over, the intern gone – a knock-off manufacturer displays exact copies of the precious designs at the fair. The original manufacturer goes broke, the photo studio nearly does as well; nobody from the furniture or automotive industries wants to work with them anymore.

Stories like this have surrounded the silver-salt diffusion process in the photography world ever since Edwin Land gave it the name of his antireflective coating for sunglasses (1).

When the concern celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1978, its public image was dominated by private pornography production as well as criminal extortion – even the RAF and the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer (2). At this point in time there was little remaining cultural engagement in the corporate literature (3), although the nature photographer Ansel Adams (4), a firm friend of the company from its first days, had already published a first monograph comprised entirely of Polaroid reproductions in 1974. At the same time, Barbara Hitchcock in the US and Manfred Heiting in Europe had begun generously distributing instant photo materials to