Polaroids

Julian Schnabel: Polaroids is a survey of instant photographs Schnabel has taken since the 1970s, edited by curator Petra Giloy-Hirtz and published by Prestel in 2010. The book was produced alongside a Giloy-Hirtz-curated exhibition of the same material.

The Polaroids work as a private visual diary rather than a planned project: portraits of family, friends, fellow artists and actors, studio interiors, and the plates and surfaces Schnabel paints on. Assembled into a book, they read as the informal record standing behind the large, deliberately public paintings and films he is known for.

Schnabel made his name in the late 1970s with the broken-crockery "plate paintings" that helped define Neo-Expressionism, and he later built a parallel career as a filmmaker with Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Polaroids sets this smaller, unguarded body of picture-making next to that larger, more public output.