From June 13 to September 15, 2019, the McCord Museum will be hosting the Canadian exclusive premiere of The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, a large- scale international exhibition organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, New York/ Lausanne, in collaboration with the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the WestLicht Museum for Photography in Vienna. The exhibition is presented by La Presse +.

“The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology is an extensive retrospective on the invention of the Polaroid, a photographic process that greatly inspired the creative approaches of photographers and artists in Montreal and internationally. The exhibition reveals the impact of the technology and includes a wealth of extremely creative works. This is a fantastic opportunity to highlight the importance of photography at the McCord Museum by incorporating bodies of work that showcase the contributions of Montreal artists,” says Hélène Samson, the curator of the McCord Museum’s Photography collection.

The Polaroid, both an image and a wonderful tool, remains associated in the collective imagination with innovation, e ciency and leisure. The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology presents the original works of some 100 of the most celebrated international artists of the 20th century, including Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, Chuck Close and Charles Eames, along with acclaimed Montreal artists like Evergon. The exhibition covers a wide variety of formats, ranging from the standard Polaroid (10.7 cm by 8.8 cm) to some very large sizes, including one assembly measuring 1.44 m by 2.99 m. A more technical part of the exhibition describes the development of various Polaroid cameras and acces- sories, highlighting the genius of their inventor, Edwin Land (1909–91), and the immediacy of the process that has inspired creators both here and elsewhere. The exhibition has been curated by William A. Ewing, Barbara P. Hitchcock, Rebekka Reuter, Gary Van Zante and Deborah G. Douglas.