In a world full of instant there have been unfortunate casualties; Polaroid instant film was on the verge of discontinuation. A marvel of its time the simplicity was its pull. Press, flash, picture. Simple. Then the wait, the anticipation to see what you captured was a thrill that’s been lost with modern technology. It’s not just the nostalgia that makes Polaroids alluring. It’s the unpredictability. You never knew if you’d end up with a masterpiece or a disaster but it didn’t matter, it was yours.
I decided to pay tribute to the art of Polaroid photography with a book of images and an exhibition that capture intimate moments of my career through the years. I wanted to show that just because a certain technology has aged it doesn’t have to lose its appeal.
Here is an excerpt from the book’s foreword by Gisela Getty:
Hoelck’s images seem at first to be random, thrown together, an accidental assemblage, but they
provide a narrative of our cultural landscape, a series on contemporary urban life. The expressions in most portraits are introspective and skeptical, the girls seem to undress for no-one, the ketchup bottle is broken, a monochromatic image postulates CHANGE, juxtapositions of empty industrial places and self-referential youth, vulnerable, naked, Vincent Gallo frozen as a silver- star, a girl stripping down her nylon-slip, a dial on a wall, a kiss radiating a golden light streak, Hoelck’s images are always modern and now.
