"AFTER USING MY POLAROID COLORPACK 80 FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS, THE CAMERA STOPPED AND REFUSED THE ORDINARY, STRAIGHT JOB ALL CAMERAS PERFORM DAY IN AND DAY OUT: PROVIDING 'EXACT' COPIES OF REALITY.
NO MATTER WHEREUPON I POINTED THE CAMERA, THE PHOTOS MORE AND MORE APPROACHED THE LOOK OF PAINTINGS. FINALLY, ALL OUTSIDE WORLD VANISHED AND THE QUANTITY OF POSSIBLE PAINTING IN POLAROIDS REACHED THE POINT OF CULMINATION.
SINCE THEN, THE CAMERA'S IMAGES GAVE AN IMPRESSION OF VISIONS - VISIONS OF DREAMING OF MARK ROTHKO'S PAINTINGS.
I BELIEVE THAT HER HEART BELONGS TO ROTHKO."
- Joachim Schulz -
Joachim Schulz’s series Her Heart Belongs to Rothko arose from the experimentation with the artist's Polaroid Colorpack 80, which preferred the abstract shapes and colors akin to a Rothko painting over the representation of our seen reality. Over the course of half a year, Schulz found that his polaroid camera — a small, plastic camera that has been in his family since he was a child — began to gradually manipulate the film inside of it, scratching away the emulsion with each new attempt to take a photograph until, as Schulz observed, “step by step, the camera refused to write exact copies of reality.” Excited with the camera’s own interpretations, Schulz continued producing works with the polaroid, allowing each new abstraction to emerge from the body of the camera.
Her Heart Belongs to Rothko, Tripticon 1, Polaroid, Polaroid Back, and Polaroid Transfer, 1997
The interplay between painting and photography runs deeply through each work as the chemical process takes over and the images strongly reference Rothko. As the camera processes the film in its own unusual ways, the series focuses more upon the final picture and its abstract beauty rather than notion of producing a typical, representational photograph. Transferring the polaroids to hand-made paper, Schulz further blurs and broadens the definition of the photographic genre.
Even when the lens was shut, the squared layers of blues, yellows, reds and greens emerged from the darkness of the Polaroid’s body, producing abstract configurations in the same nebulous impression of a Rothko.