Please return Polaroid

Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to announce Miles Aldridge: Please Return Polaroid, an exhibition of over 30 unique Polaroid prints, 10 unique Polaroid diptychs and five large color prints. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery since 2009. Miles Aldridge’s Polaroids have been exhumed from their original context of preparatory sketches. Bearing hand-written notes, sharpie drawings, or chemical chimeras, Aldridge’s Polaroids are like ravaged stills from an erotic film noir. They are rife with intrigue, sex, impulse, and accident. Like in all of Aldridge’s work, each image presents a narrative that is cinematic yet abstract, dream-driven yet precise.

The exhibition celebrates the publication of a 204 page volume of Aldridge’s Polaroids, Miles Aldridge: Please return Polaroid, published by Steidl, with an essay by the prominent British novelist and writer Michael Bracewell. Bracewell writes: ‘Aldridge seems to turn Polaroid into summation as well as commentary – rather as though these discreet, keen, cold, intoxicating glimpses into a half-world between reality and cinema, romantic narrative and technical process, might do the work of intense short stories: the kind of stories in which atmosphere becomes action and gesture becomes character. Open-ended stories, driven by mystery and the relationship between glamour, poetry and violence – as understood by Raymond Chandler.’ Aldridge will be in attendance at the opening reception and signed copies of the book will be available.

Miles Aldridge is famous for his surreal, hyper-chromatic world. Planet Aldridge is a luxury world just slightly beyond our own: hyper-sexualized, hyper-slick, ceremonial and full of dread. All is perfect, yet something is amiss; a bare-breasted blonde draped over lobster and caviar, a brunette skewered by a carousel, a school girl engulfed in too many teddy bears.

Aldridge, born in 1964, lives and works in London. Aldridge’s work has been exhibited at prominent venues, including the Tate Britain and Somerset House, London. His photographs are found in significant public and private collections worldwide including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the International Center of Photography, New York. Six monographs of Aldridge’s work have been published, including The Cabinet (Reflex New Art Gallery, 2007); Acid Candy (Reflex New Art Gallery, 2008, introduction by Marilyn Manson); Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs (Steidl, 2009); Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me (Rizzoli, 2013, introduction by Glenn O’Brien) and Other Pictures (Editions 7L/Steidl, 2013). His photographs appear regularly in international publications such as American Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and most notably Vogue Italia, with whom Aldridge has worked closely throughout his career.