Todd Stewart

The basic, consumer Polaroid has dual characteristics of tenuous tactility and, improbably, near total artistic self-reference. Whatever meter applied to the standard digital or analogue photographic process is mitigated by the Polaroid’s instant: what is there in front of you now, survived what was there in front of the camera then. Further, the way you appreciate it as such invests the image with an artistically independent quality: this is a Polaroid photo, this is how a Polaroid photo behaves. To the contemporary mind, so trained in the wildly speculative, this flippant verisimilitude is striking.

Todd Stewart lives and works in New York. His weblog “Ok, Oh.” is a marriage of the intrinsic qualities of the Polaroid, the necessarily fuzzy math of inspiration and blog culture. He attended the SVA Graduate Photography program, has shown his work in numerous group shows and continues to produce in both the analogue photographic and digital video mediums.