Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

As we approached the dawn of the digital age, we still consumed images through news and print media, television, movies, and music. Pearl Jam’s 1996 album No Code used a mosaic of 144 Polaroid images within its packaging, and became a physical staple in my cd player and the subject of fascination of my teenaged artist mind. The square format of the Polaroids, arranged in a seemingly interminable collage, presupposed the Instagram feed, but in physical form. In the days before we could curate our visual personality online, we had album artwork like No Code’s to help build that personality for us. The transformative power of the images contained within the album was their physical presence — the record featured Polaroids within its cover and in facsimile images within the package. The images were meant to be looked at. My paper examines the photographic theory underlying the ubiquitization of the Polaroid image, its role in vernacular photography, and how the artistic integrity of the Polaroid images on the album influenced me as an artist, impacting my photography as the objectives of the photo world shifted from physical to digital in the late 1990s. In addition, my paper utilizes biographical elements to contrast and narrate the building of personality within the analog age versus the digital.