SX-70 PHOTOMANIPULATIONS, 1970’S, UNIQUE (never exhibited); 2) OIL PAINTINGS DERIVED FROM SX-70 POLAROID IMAGES, 1970’s, exhibited LERNER HELLER GALLERY, NYC and BIENVILLE GALLERY, NEW ORLEANS; C-Prints exhibited in One Man show at CRAWDAD GALLERY, ST SIMONS IS., GA. NB:

One of Polaroid Corporation’s most interesting products was its SX70 Instant Camera, released in the early 1970s. Early on, upon crumpling an “unsatisfactory” photo before discarding, I noticed the colors would “morph” according to the crumpled folds. Converting this bit of serendipity to intentional design, I subsequently used conventional tools (ball points, wooden sculpture tools, finger nails, etc) to alter images that I would stage in advance for the desired “secondary” result. From that point on, I do not recall ever intentionally taking a conventional photograph with that camera.

Although never offered for exhibition, some of my original SX70 images are shown on this site. Some were yet-again “transformed”, by projection onto oversized photosensitized canvas, to create black and white renderings of the manipulated color photographs. Overpainting of the black and white images with transparent oils allowed them to be taken to a still “higher” plane, affording greater freedom with color and form than even the manipulated photographs had provided. These works were the subject of several one-person and group exhibits in New York and New Orleans in the 1970s, at Lerner Heller Gallery (NYC) and Bienville Gallery (NOLA). More recently, C-Prints of some of these images were the subject of a benefit exhibit at St Simon Island’s Crawdad Gallery entitled “Polaroids to Hemorrhoids and Back”.

The following two are selections from oversized oil paintings derived from these images.

For early work, a collection of etchings and Surrealist Beginnings, click here.