AUDIO TOUR - ABOUT THE CAMERA

For this series, Joyce utilized the Polaroid 20x24 camera. The gigantic view camera is five-feet tall, 235 pounds, and produces arresting, startlingly detailed 20x24-inch instant black-and-white and color contact prints. Dr. Edwin Land, Polaroid’s founder, instructed the company to construct the first prototype of the camera in 1976. By 1978, the company’s Vision Research department, under the direction of John McCann, added five additional cameras.

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After building the cameras, Polaroid also created a special studio (the 20 x 24 Studio) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and invited photographers to try out the new medium on three of the cameras (the other two were sent to Amsterdam and Tokyo). In 1980 the 20 x 24 Studio separated from Polaroid, and John Reuter, a former Polaroid employee, became the Executive Director. The studio eventually moved to New York City because of the commercial photography potential in the city. The camera was used by several important artists, including Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 2013, Chuck Close used it to shoot 20 different celebrities for Vanity Fair, including Oprah, Brad Pitt, and Scarlett Johansson.

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The camera sits on a rectangular wheeled frame with two vertical columns that support the camera. In the front is a lens. There are three lenses designed for the 20x24 camera that offer different levels of magnification. The middle part of the camera consists of the bellows. They can extend from 17 inches at its most compressed all the way to 60 inches when fully extended. This also adds an extra way to control lens magnification. The back part of the camera is where the film is put in, as well as where the film development takes place.

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Polaroid film comes as positives and negatives in 50 and 150-foot rolls, respectively. After an exposure is made, a motor pushes the negative-positive sandwich through huge, high-tech rollers to spread the chemical mixture that acts as a developer, and the print is sliced from the camera with a common box cutter. After 90 to 100 seconds the film positive is carefully pulled apart from the negative, and the finished print is ready with its trademark chemical smear borders. It is not dissimilar from the small Polaroids that were more readily available and very popular in the late 20th century, but in a much, much larger format.

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The necessary film was phased out of production by 2008; Reuter managed to restart production of the necessary chemicals in 2010, but support was ended at the end of 2017. They were able to make a brief comeback, but the materials continue to prove a challenge because of cost and availability. Although these large-scale Polaroids are rare nowadays, some artists are still working to bring back the medium. There is a Polaroid 20x24 studio in Berlin and in 2021, Ethan Moses became the first non-Polaroid entity to construct his own 20x24 camera.