Photographer, painter, sculptor, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Once again available to readers, this long out-of-print volume presents a thorough compilation of Samara's photographic work, beginning with his earliest "Auto-Polaroids." This exhaustive body of work paved the way for a generation of contemporary photo-artists, expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium. Using Polaroid materials, large--sometimes life-sized--formats, manipulated imagery, and composites, Samaras helped forge a vocabulary employed by artists and photographers throughout the eighties. In his most profound achievement, he adopted one of photography's basic genres--portraiture--and used it as a basis for an inquiry into the self, which remains unmatched in its intensity and boundless in its ramifications. Photography critic Ben Lifson provides a trenchant critique and history of Samaras's work. "Samaras split himself into model, actor, director, audience, and critic," Lifson writes. "To each of these roles he brought a skilled artist's hand an an eye deeply informed by the historical traditions and motifs of art and by the vernacular and popular traditions of photography. He became a rare figure in American art, not an artist who occasionally uses photography for tactical reasons . . . but an artist who made photography central to his aesthetic campaign."

"...[P]rovides a rare opportunity to understand the city's artistic momentum through a series of interviews with some of the leaders of that world" --Back cover.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 15, 2010-May 2, 2011.

From its inception in 1947, the Polaroid system inspired artists to experiment - to dazzling effect - with the cameras' unique technologies. Edwin Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid instant camera, remarked on his discovery, "Photography will never be the same." And he was right. This fascinating journey through the Polaroid era documents the evolution of instant photography. Hundreds of color images celebrate the myriad ways Polaroid photographs were used and ingeniously manipulated by Chuck Close, Walker Evans, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras, William Wegman, and others. In addition, the book features essays addressing the unique technology of instant photography and the marketing genius of the Polaroid Corporation. Interviews with artists reveal how Polaroids affected and, in many instances, forever changed the way artists captured the world around them. AUTHOR: Mary-Kay Lombino is the Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She has curated several exhibitions including Off the Shelf: New Forms in Contemporary Artists' Books and Utopian Mirage: Social Metaphors in Contemporary Photography. ILLUSTRATIONS: 230 photos