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."