Over the past three years Stuart Sandford has been taking Polaroids, which he has then cut and re-assembled in new compositions. The resulting body of work, unequivocally titled Polaroid Collages, document the artist’s social circle – his “friends, lovers & others”, in his own words – in several locations between Los Angeles and Mexico.  Stuart started working with an instant camera in 2007 and revisited the medium seven years later, when he first arrived in L.A. to do a residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation, a life-changing experience. 

Taking a Polaroid finds a perfect equivalent in writing down a note: both actions share the same immediacy and respond to the same urgency of fixing an idea before it disappears. 

It’s something that has to do with capturing a thought or an instant, clinging to a moment, in the awareness that we’ll be able to go back to it, in the form of memories. Promises of a pleasure yet to come. 

Indeed, the Polaroid Collages originate from the pleasure that comes from satisfying small desires: the desire to photograph, which is also, almost inevitably, the desire to look, to smell, to touch, to taste, to possess.

Stuart describes his works in poetical terms, calling them “instant sculptures that, held in your hand, come alive and sing”. The physical nature of these images – a fact that we hardly associate to photography, these days – is enhanced by the cuts and the junction lines left visible on the surface of each photograph, reminding us that these are pictures made of fragments.

We are attracted by what is fragmentary because we are invited to fill in the gaps with our own sensibilities. Most ancient Greek sculptures, which established a powerful and enduring ideal of male beauty, came to us in pieces. Our very essence, our memory, is fragmentary by nature.