Artist Statement
I started working with Polaroid Image Transfers back in the late 1980’s. It was a process just gaining popularity, and it was different from the strictly black & white images I was producing at the time. It was also a process in which you’re not always sure what you will end up with.
I continued to work through my college years with great success due to the encouragement from my professors. Van Deren Coke was one of my professors as well as one of the leading art historians of the time. He compared my images to the weathered posters of a Paris Kiosk containing a contrast of both beauty and destruction in the same image. I was pleased to see more students experimenting with this process after my last year and the several times going to show and lecture after earning my Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1991.
My work is filled with primitive desire and emotional turmoil which are both expressed beautifully in the process. I have always believed a work of art should speak for itself without a lot of explanation from its author. Art is my way of dealing with when words won’t suffice. I believe this may be why we do art anyways, to express what we will or will not choose to say in words.
With the end of the production of the film by Polaroid, my work with this process is now at it’s end. Unless some company picks up the production of its peel apart films we will never see a process quite the same again.
Bio
I have been making images for over thirty five years, coming from a background intermixed with photojournalism and fine art photography. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Arizona State University.
Ken Brown