LA Flash @ LACMA

Last Saturday evening the LA County Museum of Art hosted a celebration of Los Angeles street style with an event called LA Flash. Billed as "one of the social and photographic highlights of the season" it featured book signings by Larry Sultan, Henry Wessel, Lauren Greenfield, Ed Panar, and Mike Slack.

Just off the entrance to the museum was an exhibition of Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The exhibition is a mix of prints from the various series he's done over the past 20 years. Unfortunately for me, this approach didn't work, but what I would really recommend was the showing of 1,000 of his Polaroids. It really gave me a chance to get a better sense of how he thinks and there was an intimacy that his large photographs lack.

It got me thinking about Polaroid and how working with it was such an important part of so many photographers' creative experience. There's something about being able to lay a set of Polaroid prints down on the table and try and figure out what was or wasn't working with a shooting session. Prints could be cropped, combined with other images, placed into layouts...you name it, and at the end of the shoot you'd be able to bring them home. I still have Polaroids that I look at every day - trying to figure out why I'm drawn to an image - what' s important about it.

I wonder if the demise of Polaroid is also about the demise of the print. So many of our images are never printed now, they just exist on hard drives or cell phones. Is it still important to print? What's important about the printed image?

Just wondering,
AM