Polaroid Image Transfer in photography

Polaroid Image Transfer in photography

By Deborah Cameron

JAKARTA (JP): A canal of pale brown water surges past two distinct scenes -- the chaos of a market bus stop just before the rain and the elegance of a bare, white-walled gallery and its habitues. An image of clamor within sight of calm.

Two large metal boxes, still bearing their air cargo stamps, are being hauled into the quiet peace of the Galeri Foto Jurnalistik Antara while outside an enormous crate of furnishing fabric disappears into a side-street of Pasar Baru on the back of a gasping truck.

The gallery curator, Yudhi Soerjoatmodjo, breaks the locks on the metal boxes. It is an important moment, his first glimpse of the photographic artwork which have already been shown in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Manila and, after Jakarta, will go to Tokyo, Seoul and New York.

The photographs, the first of their kind to be exhibited in Jakarta, were made by German photographers using the Polaroid Image Transfer technique, a relatively new development that involves the use of a large camera, large format instant negatives and a developing technique that allows the photographer much more freedom to experiment and manipulate the finale image. The exhibition, which opens today, will remain until April 8.

Yudhi removes a dozen of the works from their packing boxes and leans them randomly against the walls -- the still life of a fish, almost two meters long and partially swathed in gray felt -- dominates the room as he discusses the exhibit.

"The images are rather impressionistic," he said.

"People say that it is almost like painting. It's not just photography but it's also playing with the final images."

As he gazes at the art through Giorgio Armani tortoiseshell spectacles, flashing his orange and purple argyle socks, Yudhi, himself a professional photographer and former picture editor of the banned Tempo magazine, could be sitting in a gallery in downtown New York.

"Photography is about creative selection," he said, "it is about reducing life to a few pictures."

And the image transfer process gives photographers even greater powers of intervention in the making of an image. But because it is expensive and time consuming the method has mainly been used by photographer-artists and for commercial applications and has rarely been available to photographers in Indonesia.

The idea for the exhibition came from the Goethe Institut, the German cultural organization, whose Jakarta director, Rudolf Barth, had heard about the work of students from the Wiesbaden Academy, whose photographs are featured in the exhibition. He thought that they illustrated an important and new development in art and photography.

"This blurs the definition between fine art and photography," Barth said.

"It combines what I'd describe as the human element of fine art and the quite technical matter of reproducing a photograph. This exhibition redefines those ideas."

The exhibition catalog also attempts to explain the overall effect of the art, stating that it combines "the expressive qualities in photography with those in painting, graphics and typography."

Part of the attraction of the Polaroid Image Transfer technique is that it liberates photographers from printing their work on paper alone. Instead the Wiesbaden students used silk, rice paper, photocopies, kitchen towels, dish-cloths, other photographs and their own drawings as the printing surface. The result for the viewer is that the works have a texture and dimension that is unexpected in photography.

The images range from the simple reproduction of a saxophone photograph on sheet music to studies of human bodies and household objects that are almost architectural.

As part of the exhibition, the Goethe Institut has flown two experts to Jakarta from Wiesbaden Academy's Department of Design to hold a lecture series.

Professor Volker Liedsfeldt and Professor Rainer Gehr, will give three lectures which at a cost of Rp 750,000 are aimed at professional photographers and artists who already have some knowledge of the complex and highly technical production process of Polaroid Image Transfer.

Liedsfeldt was a leader of the Wiesbaden Academy project that created the photographs.

The exhibition is the second this year at the Galeri Foto Jurnalistik Antara, which is located at Jl. Antara 59 and is a hub for what its director Yudhi argues is a lively and blossoming local professional photography scene.

He said that it had been acknowledged that the Galeri was the first of its type in Asia -- a non-profit exhibition space for photographers -- and that since 1994 it had hosted 72 exhibitions, workshops and public events.

"What we present is serious photography but at the same time we don't want to scare people," Yudhi said.

"We want to reach a vast audience and we try to accommodate those who don't have the money to buy a camera, as well as those who are not interested in taking the pictures but who want to look at the results."