Polaroid photography is one of those pieces of analog life that Gen Z has decided to embrace, despite the fact that it wasn’t very good. As with wired headphones, the technology was impressive when it debuted, but unlike vinyl records, there are more drawbacks than benefits. Important to remember, too, is that when your favorite artists were using Polaroids, they were doing so because they found the medium to be futuristic. Andy Warhol would go around parties with his Big Shot, and Diaries has a woman in 1980 asking him, “When are you going to Xerox me, darling?”
“Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago makes the case for Samaras (1936-2024) as one of the most inventive of Polaroid’s artistic converts. Drawn largely from the museum’s own collection, supplemented with recent gifts from the Samaras estate, the show assembles more than 40 works, with photographs displayed alongside select sculptures, paintings and drawings. It also covers the arc from his earliest AutoPolaroids of 1969-70 through to the enormous Sitting tableaux of the late 1970s and his sliced-up Panoramas of the mid-1980s.
A standout piece from the show is Samaras’s grid of AutoPolaroids (1969/70). These precede Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977) by a good margin and are seen as an influence, sharing their playful exploration of identity as the artist dons wigs, makeup, expressions and props to conjure a host of diverse characters in black and white. But the Polaroid offers a different flavor from Film Stills. Those were deeply concerned with photography, supposedly shot by people like Richard Prince and Robert Longo, and featuring Hollywood-style set design and framing. Samaras’s are more about that feeling of going insane in your apartment alone.
Like the AutoPolaroids, his Photo-Transformation 11/6/73 (1973) emphasized the strengths of the medium. Here, Samaras manipulates the 20 layers in a piece of Polaroid film with his fingers or a stylus in a performance that yields something intense, damaged and surreal in the perfect way.
But New Yorkers are interested in real estate as much as we are in transcendence. In Still Life (1978), the artist captures the cluttered kitchen table in his studio. Paint brushes mingle with Café Bustelo, plants and a planning shot for the finished photograph we now regard. This piece emerged following Polaroid’s invitation to test a new 8×10 camera. This larger format meant he couldn’t manipulate the emulsion the way he did with the SX-70 prints, so Samaras had to make the transformation happen in front of the camera rather than on the print. The result is a disembodied head that seems to be growling, a ferocious piece of clutter among all the others that vie for your attention. No wonder Peter Schjeldahl called him the “artist laureate of narcissism.”
“Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through July 20, 2026.
