SLAVA MOGUTIN

Bill Arning

Freedom from Puritans Eyes: Slava Mogutin’s Polaroid Art

The invention of instant photography dates back to 1948, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the Polaroid Corporation introduced the SX-70 camera, the first mass-produced instant photography device that required no chemicals or technical skills yet delivered good quality, self-developed and unique photographs into one’s hands.

Over the past two decades, Slava Mogutin has embraced this iconic American invention. Using a variety of vintage Polaroid cameras, Mogutin conjures the aura of long-lost desires and a more innocently flirtatious period than our fast-food global sexual menu manifested in the over-efficiency of Grindr and Scruff apps. It’s impossible to consider these artworks without wrestling with the medium, the artist’s generational relationship to that medium, his choices of subjects and his decision to capture each person in a grid of four pictures creating a multi-dimensional portrait.

It may seem impossible to someone born after 1970 that there was a time when seeing a picture of oneself required a degree of struggle. One needed analog film, a camera whose only function was to expose that film, and someone to turn the exposed film into a picture. Color film had to be processed in a commercial photography lab, which meant if you wanted to see an image of yourself masturbating, having sex or just looking good naked in lifelike color, the hunt for a non-judgmental lab was often difficult and dangerous, especially if you were gay and likely committing a punishable crime in your erotic photos. The risk was rarely worth it so most people lived with the regret that there was no accurate record to their lost youthful pulchritude, whispering on their deathbeds, “You should have seen me when I was your age, I swear I was dynamite.”

But in 1972, at the cusp moment for emerging queer pride, the commercial SX-70 camera became widely available. Pioneering photographers Ansel Adams and Walker Evans experimented with the SX-70 with stunning results. Helmut Newton was the first photographer to incorporate Polaroids in his fashion shoots. But the triumvirate of artists who are most identified with SX-70 experimentation—Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Lucas Samaras—share space in this cultural lineage with the most utopian of gay photographers like Tom Bianchi.

For every certifiable artwork using the new medium, a thousand horny buggers learned how to angle the camera to make their cocks look bigger. A friend in high school in the mid-70s would photograph his naked body with an erection—always avoiding his face—and write his phone number at the bottom of each Polaroid and slip them under the doors of his potential future lovers. It usually worked.

There is no reason remaining today for Polaroids to be used for that purpose. Most people have cameras on their phones of higher quality in terms of detail and focus than any SX-70 but the aura of exhibitionism and potential seduction lingers in the medium. Mogutin uses that libidinal energy and one feels it even when his subjects are fully dressed or posed as secondary to lush flowers.

Mogutin’s subjects today are a mix of known cultural provocateurs like Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Lydia Lunch, Cassils and Christeene, and those fated to be beautiful, charismatic or colorful before his lens. Photographs in every form speak of the passage of time—the universal statement that this moment happened and immediately started careening into the cold dead past. Whatever the photograph’s truth value, the knowledge that we could never return here again was paramount, no one could. The photograph is all that remains and this is especially true in our age in which an unending stream of photographs of trivial events shared wildly and immediately defines the constant evanescence of lived experience.

Polaroid photos by their nature violate the “instant turning past” ontology of photography. No Polaroid gets taken without the concurrent experience of watching the image appear together—photographer, subject and witnesses. Shy people including Andy Warhol immediately valued that if you took someone’s Polaroid you got to talk to them as they watched their picture appear. If your model is Genesis, the experience of talking to them as the picture develops is worth the cost of the camera and the film. If it’s a sexy naked person, those minutes of conversation might mean love has time to blossom. Mogutin’s grids of four images add the time in between each exposure to the developing time. Some marriages last less long than the time the artist enjoyed with these models.

As I have been considering these artworks, Genesis did in fact abandon their mortal body after a long period of illness, so these grids have the gift of additional time attached to their instantaneousness. Even with an extended interior notion of time one can’t take that with you, into eternity or even into the weekend. The time Mogutin spent with Genesis is visible in their many grids and obviously precious but it’s still finite. Resisting the certainty of finitude comes with being born in a mortal body. We are all wired to want more time on earth getting to know love and care for other human bodies. It’s the reason our photographs matter so much to us.

In the post-COVID era, in which the exchange of physical objects rather than digitized content is seen as inherently risky, the image of artist and model handing developing picture objects back and forth as a joyful, communally shared activity might be hard to recapture—but we must try. Most if not all of Mogutin’s models were born performers, happiest when on display in some form. I imagine the smile on the models faces when they saw the way Mogutin pictured them, and I feel the same smile appear on my face. As it is on yours right now.