Polaroid artist sticks to film
Just as we reported on the demise of Polaroid film, a story like this pops up. Award-winning photographer Dennis Stierer has just opening an exhibit in Lockport, N.Y. featuring gelatin prints, manipulated SX70 Polaroids, platinum/palladium prints and color prints.
Stierer has been a photographer for over 38 years and according to this Lockport Union Sun & Journal story, considers himself a photographer before a photojournalist.
“I’m a photographer,” he said. “There’s no pretext to it. Sometimes I take pictures for the newspaper and sometimes I take pictures for me, both of which I hope a lot of people enjoy.”
That’s what’s happening at the Kenan Gallery.
“We really enjoyed the manipulated Polaroid’s. They’re something different we’ve never seen,” said Bob Blackman, a Cambria farmer who attended the opening with his wife Margaret. “He picks up a perception of scenery that maybe a normal person walks by and doesn’t appreciate. All of sudden, when he captures it, you say ‘wow.’ I looked at that also and didn’t see that, but he did.”
Polaroid just announced that it’s getting out of the film industry due to the rise of digital photography, but that’s a trend that Stierer has yet to take up.
“I like working with that type of camera and real film, working in the dark room, hand-coating my papers to make prints.,” he said. “I like the hands-on approach to doing photography. It’s not that you have more control, it’s a different type of process. It slows you down to do something. You need time to do this and the time gives you more time to think about what you are really doing.”
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