Please return Polaroid

clothbound, 117 images. 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a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material still traded on eBay.

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.