INSTANT LIGHT: TARKOVSKY POLAROIDS

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the person who made films as pretty and still as Stalker or Solaris would be a total polaroid genius as well. I have a polaroid camera and when I picked up the book I, in a state of complete hubris, imagined I could learn some tricks or compare photos. Of course not. These photos are beyond. In the best ones have a golden, celestial glow I’ve never seen before. There’s an essay before and after, one of which includes a super trill story about giving a photo to an Uzbeki man who returns it saying, “why stop time?”, the other pointing out how these photos stress an Eastern Orthodox horizontality and flatness, not a more Western vanishing point perspective. All of that is certainly possible. I would say the photos are less interesting for their layout, which, admittedly is god-level, than their colors. More specifically a brightness and luminousness that you look at and assume is immediately going to start wilting they seem so in bloom. But all of this is aside the point, the photos themselves are well laid out and copied in the original polaroid scale. The shots are broken up by Tarkovsky’s text, not unlike the Teju Cole book (is there a name for this format?), and like Cole’s they are sometimes specifically, sometimes elliptically, about photography. Cole’s words are more interesting but goddamn these photos are good. Nine hammers and 10 sickles.