Victor Schrager, Large Format Polaroid Photograph Still Life Color Photo Dye Print Betty Hahn Art, 1980

Description

Victor Schrager
Title: Olympia
Date: 1980
Original Polaroid Large Format Print (Photo-Internal dye diffusion transfer)
Location: Cambridge Massachusetts United States … more Victor Schrager
Title: Olympia
Date: 1980
Original Polaroid Large Format Print (Photo-Internal dye diffusion transfer)
Location: Cambridge Massachusetts United States
Dimensions: Image: 27 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. (69.9 x 52.1 cm), Paper: 29 1/4 x 21 1/2 in. (74.3 x 54.6 cm)
This depicts an assemblage collage of images including a Gourmet Magazine, black & white photos and some colorful ceramics.

From "Five Still Lifes"
New York: Paradox Editions, Ltd., 1980. 5 original Polaroid color prints. Each hand signed, titled, dated and numbered 37/40 in ink in the margin. Each approximately 24 x 20in (image size). Each is on original as there are no negatives in this process. The photographers included: Robert Cumming, Robert Fichter, Betty Hahn, Victor Schrager and William Wegman. The photos were produced in the Polaroid Corporation’s 20×24 studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This is an internal Dye Diffusion print (large format) Polaroid print. These are exceedingly rare now. This format was used by many of the leading photographers of the second half of the 20th century, among them Peter Beard, Chuck Close, David Levinthal, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Lucas Samaras, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and, perhaps most significantly, Ansel Adams More recently Ellen Carey has created large abstract masterpieces using this format.

Born in Maryland, Victor Schrager grew up in New York City and earned a B.A. at Harvard in 1972 and an MFA at Florida State University in 1975. Schrager took his first job at the Light Gallery in New York, where his interest in photography deepened as he grew familiar with the many leading photographers on the gallery's roster, including Emmet Gowin, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. Since the late 1970s, Schrager has been photographing still lifes and collages, as well as other forms of combined imagery and text. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1980, and in 1993 a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been shown in numerous important group exhibitions, including the 1981 Whitney Biennial, and The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s organized by the National Museum of American Art in 1989. He has been given one-person exhibitions in New York City at commercial galleries and at P.S. 1, and his work is held by many major museum collections.
Victor Schrager's photographs explore how different modes of information, especially visual, literary, historical, and scientific, function to produce and communicate knowledge. In the works for which he is best known, he photographs still lifes composed of layered images and texts--among them reproductions of paintings, maps, magazine pictures, pages from books, and photographic prints--in an investigation of how context structures the meaning of all representations. Schrager is one of several artists of the 1980s who made use of strategies such as appropriation and montage in works that examine the proliferation of information in contemporary culture.
Cynthia Fredette, Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 227.
From his writings: I have been seduced by photography since I made my first prints in sixth grade. I printed negatives my father sent me from his travels around the world—the South American jungle, the Kremlin, Africa. My experience being director of Light Gallery in New York from 1975–78, working intimately with many of the most significant photographers—from Paul Strand, Kertész, Callahan, Siskind, Sommer, to Friedlander, Winogrand, Emmet Gowin, to Jan Groover, Stephen Shore, Robert Heinecken and Nick Nixon—certainly established a sense of the inexhaustible possibilities of the medium. Influences—I tend to be intrigued by individual images from all kinds of sources, high and low, rather than whole bodies of work by individuals. Among those who have been important for me are: Frederick Sommer, Josef Sudek, Piet Zwart, Jan Tschichold, Irving Penn, Charles Jones, James Nasmyth, Jaromír Funke. Also Philip Guston, Giorgio Morandi, Stuart Davis, Gertrude Stein.

Selected Public Collections

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Morgan Library and Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art
George Eastman House
Princeton University Art Museum
Museum of Modern Art, New York
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
National Gallery of Australia
Metropolitan Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
Cranbrook Academy of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Denver Art Museum
Houston Museum of Fine Arts
International Center for Photography
Cleveland Museum of Art
Polaroid Collection
Goldman Sachs & Co.
Florida State University
First Boston Corporation
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris
Brown University
Ohio Wesleyan University
Rhode Island School of Design Museum less