Miles Aldridge Knihy

Please Please Return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge’s ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge’s Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions. Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge’s dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!

In this book Miles Aldridge delves into his Polaroid archive — venturing back through twenty years of enhancing, modifying, reassembling and discarding. Many of these Polaroids were intentionally annotated or accidentally damaged while working on different shoots. Liberated from their original context, the images take on a life of their own by evolving into surreal and cinematic narratives. By enlarging and manipulating the Polaroids in unpredictable ways, Aldridge devotes himself to each Polaroid as an independent image while simultaneously learning to appreciate the importance of flaws and imperfections. This book provides us with a rare insight into a photographer’s odyssey; an unfolding journey of the imagination in parallel to his working process.