New York Photo Festival 37 Main Street, Brooklyn NY 11201 New York États-Unis
Location: Tobacco Warehouse
A Polaroid collection presented by L’Atelier Reflexe ( France ) and Cobertura photo ( Spain )
Curated by : Véronique Bourgoin
Magic Trick is a collection of Polaroid pictures gathered by Véronique Bourgoin, a French artist and director of l’Atelier Reflexe, founded in 1994 in Montreuil-Sous-Bois (Paris). This collection shows a selection of pictures taken by European photographers who use Polaroid not as a specialty, but as a way to experiment through a unique and instant medium. It comprises works by experienced artists as well as anonymous photographs. It also presents pictures taken by young French and Spanish photographers selected by l’Atelier Reflexe and Cobertura Photo, art institutes which support young photographers throughout the world.
At a time when digital techniques have set new standards both in amateur and professional photography, allowing photographers to gather a large number of pictures through virtual storage and print them almost instantaneously at home, one cannot help comparing these techniques with Polaroid. The latter can be considered both as the mould and the opposite of the former. It has a unique character and a raw quality revealed by the artist’s hands. The intimacy, the magic and the uniqueness of this process, which brutally captures moments and fix them in a suspended spacetime between past and future, gives a poetic and timeless quality to the work thus created, often beyond the conjuror’s will. This collection, presented as a cabinet of curiosities, mixes together different visions of artists and unknowns in order to offer an overv
