Photo-Transformation, March, 31, 1976

Lucas Samaras’s Photo-transformation photographs are at once painterly images and performative objects. Created in the period from 1973 to 1976 at a time when Samaras already had an established practice working across painting, performance, and object-making, the photographs are deft manipulations of the Polaroid medium.

Taken in the intimate space of his New York studio, the transformations are chiefly self-portraits. Samaras distorted the recorded image by reworking the still-wet Polaroid emulsion by hand—smearing, blotting, and blurring it—immediately after taking the picture. By doing so, he transformed not only the image of himself, but also his chosen photographic medium by rendering the automatism of the machine-created instant Polaroid image into an expressive artistic process manipulated by the artist’s hand.