Into the Studio

Carl Chiarenza began working in the studio in 1979. His decision to move his artistic practice indoors was prompted by a chance invitation from the Polaroid Corporation to experiment with their massive 20 x 24-inch studio camera. In a 2008 interview with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen, Chiarenza explains the circumstances behind this important transition: The thing that happened in 1979 which caused me to change from outdoors to indoors—or from using things that existed in the world to making things that had not existed before—was because of Polaroid. When I, along with a half a dozen other people, were invited to test the new 20x24 camera, I was thrilled with the idea, but I had no idea what to do because I’d never brought things to the camera before. I spent a week using up a lot of their film (and therefore a lot of money that wasn’t mine) making pictures which I thought were pretty terrible because I had no idea how to do that. I was trying to do still lifes, but abstract still lifes. And it wasn’t working, and furthermore, they were in color because color was the only material they had in the first years of that camera. And since I can’t really work in color, that was the problem. But the major problem was how in the hell do you bring something to the camera—unless it’s a portrait and you do an ad or a regular still life. So that was the beginning of making collages. As I said, the stuff I made there in that first week with that camera were pretty horrible—and two things emerged from that: One, I shouldn’t try to do color. Two, I had to figure out how to make something that was related to what I wanted to see in a picture. Source: LensWork Interview (2008)