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What I love about Christopher's Polaroid's is that they're a potent relic of a very specific era -- the 70's and early 80's. What a time of incredible energy and excess! People were out all night, Studio 54 was packed, New York was where it was all happening and going out was frenetic, exciting and very, very fun. In many ways, although this may seem like a contradiction, it was also a time of greater innocence, and that's what these pictures capture.
SX 70s existed before cell phones, texting and tweeting ... all the amazing advances that have enriched life but have also chipped away at our sense of privacy. SX 70s were passed around at parties and people just had fun with them. It was all about immediacy and instant gratification. No one was afraid of being photographed back then because it was more likely a picture would end up in the back of someone's drawer than on Facebook, You Tube or the front page. So people were free, spontaneous, a little exhibitionistic. They let their guard down, they were intimate, maybe even a little outrageous. Nobody worried too much about consequences. There was a sort of shared promise that things could remain a secret.
And then there's the raw and beautiful quality of the images. They're unposed, unretouched, not art directed, very real - like a visual diary of Christopher's life. There's no master plan here, no artifice, nothing complicated or slick or tricky, just a very immediate, in your face look at the friends, the lovers, the places ... anything that caught his attention or captured his imagination. It's in some ways a very pure form of self-expression, and so personal. You wonder what the story is behind the picture, what happened after the camera was put down. There's a sort of uncomplicated poetry to these pictures that I find very moving.
You can see the seeds of Christopher's later work being planted in this book. Here, what was to develop into his edgy, black and white, documentary style is still rougher, sweeter, more innocent. There's a warmth to the colors of the Polaroid's that's so evocative of that time, but for me is also symbolic of Christopher's affection for his subjects. You can feel his curiosity about the medium of photography, his learning how to take pictures, his making visual notes about what excites his eye. But for all the innocence, I can also see very clearly the certainty of composition, the clarity of angles and the power of the work yet to come. In these images, I see the young photographer taking his first tentative steps toward mastery.
Calvin Klein nyc July 22, 2009