Polaroid’s glory days exposed

There are Marie Cosindas’s intimate, warm-toned, naturally lighted portraits of figures such as Julia Child and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Cosindas, who is in her 80s, was invited in 1962 by Edwin Land, cofounder of Polaroid and inventor of its Land camera, to test the company’s product, and that proved a turning point in her career. Polaroid actively developed ties with artists and encouraged them to experiment; that’s why the corporate collection — of which only a fraction was sold — is so illustrious.

Many pieces here are experimental. Ellen Carey’s terrific abstract photographs, made by exposing the film to a flash of light or not exposing it at all, and then pulling it through a large-format camera’s internal rollers, hang like scrolls on the wall, all at once invoking Japanese Zen calligraphy, lush painting, and photography. John Reuter offers a dozen surrealist photo constructions from the 1970s. Reuter peeled back the film and manipulated the dyes and emulsions as the image developed. His “Afterglow’’ looks as if he has applied a 19th-century portrait of a melancholy boy to the print; he hovers, frail yet sharp, against a pungently colored background.

Even the more straightforward images display an exuberant experimentation in the artist’s relationship to subject, among them Elsa Dorfman’s generous, spontaneous portraits shot with a 20-by-24-inch camera; Olivia Parker’s odd and careful still lifes; and Jim Stone’s black-and-white documentary shots, such as “Retired Upholsterer Who Covered His House with Beer Cans on his 71st Birthday, Houston, TX, 1983.’’ Like any new tool, the Polaroid liberated the artists who used it. Digital photography has long since outmoded Polaroid’s instant prints, but Polaroid artists are a loyal breed. May they continue to thrive.

Delighting in the subject