From Daniel Arnold to Mario Sorrenti, this London group show spotlights photographers who treat the image as something to be held, not just seen
Shot in one second, held in your hands moments later, the Polaroid is a special thing. In London, Webber Gallery is celebrating the tactile value of the medium with a new group exhibition led by artist and curator Aaron Stern. Featuring an eclectic mix of Polaroids, small prints, and ephemera, the display aims to recontextualise the photograph as more than just an image, offering it up as a physical object that deserves to be contemplated in person.
Based between the US and Europe, Stern is a photographer and founder of the curatorial platform A Medium Format. This particular exhibition was born from a frustration with the fickle nature of imagery in the times we are living, where most images are seen for mere seconds before disappearing into the scroll, or carelessly snapped before entering the digital wasteland of the iCloud. Bringing together special printed artefacts by 14 artists – including Daniel Arnold, Chris Rhodes, Mike Brodie, Mario Sorrenti, Laura Jane Coulson, and a special inclusion of Alexa Chung – the display mixes stories that “cannot be fully conveyed through pixels on a screen”.
It all began with a Philip-Lorca diCorcia show Stern saw at David Zwirner in 2009, which saw 1,000 of the artist’s Polaroids snaking through the gallery in one single line. “In that installation, framing and printing made photography feel more three-dimensional, more tangible,” he says. “It has always stuck with me.”
To Stern, the solid simplicity of the Polaroid is an antidote to our digitally overwhelmed lives. “Like paintings, only one exists in the world,” he says. “I love the glossiness of the image and the textured white border. It’s a physical object. One that you can hold and feel.” His favourite works in the show are by Mario Sorrenti, from his 2004 installation The Wall – a collage of 15 years worth of print layouts, contact sheets, and ephemera tacked up on the wall of his New York loft. “Before it came down, he photographed it with an 8x10 large format camera and took Polaroids as well,” says Stern. “They’re incredible to me.”
In an age of fleeting digital imagery, Stern hopes the exhibition encourages a slower, more deliberate way of looking at the world around us. “We’re all being whipsawed back and forth, not only by politics, but other aspects of life as well,” he says. “People change their entire physical appearance with an app. Technology is used to position things we buy in a certain way. In a post-truth digital world, seeing physical pictures in person feels grounding to me.”
Polaroids, Small Prints and Ephemera is on show at Webber Gallery in London until 26 June 2025.
