Americans

Fifty years ago Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched the now--famous Pocket Poets Series in San Francisco. Respectfully alluding to that achievement, the Pocket Polaroids Series devotes itself to the truthful reproduction of original instant prints - Polaroid or other, amateur or professional - and humbly strives to develop into an index of the medium as it has enriched and empowered us in the 20th century.

Morbid. Who are these people? How did their polaroids end up in flea market boxes, at garage sales or on eBay? All -images in this volume have been picked up anonymously at flea -markets in New York City and San Francisco or bought from antique dealers on ebay.com.

The collection in this first volume of the series serves as an introduction to the various generations and bloodlines of instant photography from the first monochromes of the 1940s and 50s to the brilliant materials of the 60s and 70s and the fast-fading gloss of the 1980s.

Polaroids are originals. No free second set, no negative, no backup. Anxiously anticipated, superstitiously put aside, never discarded, they convey a sense of immediacy and uniqueness that their digital successors fail to imitate. It is a bittersweet -irony that we have to flatten their aura, deprive them of their mortality and reduce them to ordinarily reproduced photos in order to celebrate their singularity. Then again: it's the -reproduction that makes the original.

Each volume in the Pocket Polaroids Series is dedicated to one concept or photographer, one location or idea - from shaky party-shots to commercial studio work, from dead serious mugshot to arty amateur porn. No credentials needed. Poetry wanted.