Yard Press
232 pages
18,5x27 cm
Paperback
Twist-stitching
Faux leather cover
Offset
500 copies
35€
If we could sum up the ‘80s in a series of unequivocal combinations, it would go like this: photography = Polaroid, music = Madonna, art = Andy Warhol. And of course, lifestyle = New York.
Edo Bertoglio – a Swiss photographer who was born in Lugano and flew to the Big Apple just at the right time – has experienced these equations, and perhaps has even helped to create them through the lens of his camera. But for those who, like us, were born in another place and another time, it could be dangerous to rely on these icons, which by definition are figures so luminous and powerful as they are superficial.
The emerging publishing house Yard Press, who recently released Edo Bertoglio. New York Polaroids 1976 – 1989, was aware of this risk from the very beginning of the book’s creation, i.e. during the selection of the material: scrolling through the images, it's clear that the protagonists are the photographs themselves, not the subjects portrayed in them. Bertoglio's roll call doesn't exclude any of the big names of that period – in addition to the characters already mentioned, we encounter Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Keith Haring among the others – but there is also Maripol, his partner at the time, portrayed without any malice but with tender affection while she is immersed in a hot bubble bath. We see the glitter and glamor of the places and parties that made the Downtown Scene famous and envied ("We invited fifty people, mainly friends, for a house warming party. On the night of the event we had more than five hundred people queuing down the street to get in."), but we also find the loneliness of a great metropolis in the cold perfection of interiors with which, not coincidentally, the book opens and ends.
New York Polaroids 1976 – 1989 is not a diary. It doesn't collect memories of what was, and doesn't allow space for nostalgia or exaltation; it's more of an agenda in which every photograph depicts a note, or appointment. While flicking through its pages, we can understand that Polaroid was to Edo an existential condition of that period of his life, a private tool to grasp the city, even before being a means for his artistic expression. "The idea of leaving Manhattan, even just for a few hours, meant we could have possibly missed something important, a once in a life-time opportunity". Instant film is here an object of survival, an everyday and necessary chemical substance, one of the many that marked the incessant flow of the metropolitan rhythm in the Eighties.