A remarkable exhibition of unique Polaroid images opens at Joseph Bellows Gallery on Saturday: Original 4x5 Polaroid Land photographs, created by George Schumacher from the late 1950’s to 1970, and drawn from the artist’s estate.

Schumacher, a psychiatrist working in central and northern California, originally considered photography a hobby. He became immersed in the Polaroid medium because of its immediacy as well as its ability to express “deep inner reflection through light and framed subject.” A chance meeting with Ansel Adams in the mid-1950s led to Schumacher’s participation in several of the Yosemite Workshops led by Adams. Adams thought so highly of his protégé’s work that he featured his images in the 1963 publication: Polaroid Land Photography Manual. This technical handbook served to acquaint and instruct photographers on the creative use of this revolutionary new photographic process. It included works by Adams, as well as such early Polaroid practitioners as Paul Caponigro, Minor White, Marie Cosindas, Philippe Halsman and Schumacher.

Schumacher’s success in capturing intimate, delicate, and quiet images led to exhibitions and reproduction in various art and photographic publications including Aperture, Art in America, and Infinity, among others. Aperture magazine, perhaps the most influential photography publication at the time, included Schumacher’s work as early as 1961. Subsequently, through the encouragement of Adams and other peers, important exhibitions would follow, including his 1968 show at the Friends of Photography, one of the first for the Carmel, California based group founded in 1967 by Adams, Morley Baer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Brett Weston, and others from the f.64 school.

About photography and the Polaroid medium, Schumacher wrote, "Often as one explores an object or subject with macroscopic or even microscopic scrutiny, the beauty and meaning seen and felt deepens to a spiritual quality. One is thus led inexorably to a more humanistic philosophy; to a better and more compassionate understanding of one's fellow man which, especially in therapy, aids in seeing and understanding more fully the "self" within. Photography thus becomes a means to a richer fulfillment in life. For me no other art medium so facilitates this integrity of seeing as photography. The Polaroid Land process, particularly, lends itself to this immediacy of visual discovery in that the completely expressive statement is ‘here and now’-uninterrupted by hours or days in darkroom work conventionally required from the initial exposure to the final image."

Opening recepton, Saturday, June 2, 5-8 pm: George Schumacher | Polaroids. Joseph Bellows Gallery, 7661 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA. Also on view: Ellen Carey | Photography Degree Zero. Above: George Schumacher, unique Polaroid Type 55 print, circa. 1960

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