Victor Schrager Title: Olympia Date: 1980 Original Polaroid Large Format Print (Photo-Internal dye diffusion transfer) Location: Cambridge Massachusetts United States Dimensions: Image: 27 1/2 x 20 1/2 in. (69.9 x 52.1 cm), Paper: 29 1/4 x 21 1/2 in. (74.3 x 54.6 cm) This depicts an assemblage collage of images including a Gourmet Magazine, black & white photos and some colorful ceramics. From "Five Still Lifes" New York: Paradox Editions, Ltd., 1980. 5 original Polaroid color prints. Each hand signed, titled, dated and numbered 37/40 in ink in the margin. Each approximately 24 x 20in (image size). Each is on original as there are no negatives in this process. The photographers included: Robert Cumming, Robert Fichter, Betty Hahn, Victor Schrager and William Wegman. The photos were produced in the Polaroid Corporation’s 20×24 studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is an internal Dye Diffusion print (large format) Polaroid print. These are exceedingly rare now. This format was used by many of the leading photographers of the second half of the 20th century, among them Peter Beard, Chuck Close, David Levinthal, Robert Frank, David Hockney, Lucas Samaras, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and, perhaps most significantly, Ansel Adams More recently Ellen Carey has created large abstract masterpieces using this format. Born in Maryland, Victor Schrager grew up in New York City and earned a B.A. at Harvard in 1972 and an MFA at Florida State University in 1975. Schrager took his first job at the Light Gallery in New York, where his interest in photography deepened as he grew familiar with the many leading photographers on the gallery's roster, including Emmet Gowin, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. Since the late 1970s, Schrager has been photographing still lifes and collages, as well as other forms of combined imagery and text. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1980, and in 1993 a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been shown in numerous important group exhibitions, including the 1981 Whitney Biennial, and The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s organized by the National Museum of American Art in 1989. He has been given one-person exhibitions in New York City at commercial galleries and at P.S. 1, and his work is held by many major museum collections. Victor Schrager's photographs explore how different modes of information, especially visual, literary, historical, and scientific, function to produce and communicate knowledge. In the works for which he is best known, he photographs still lifes composed of layered images and texts--among them reproductions of paintings, maps, magazine pictures, pages from books, and photographic prints--in an investigation of how context structures the meaning of all representations. Schrager is one of several artists of the 1980s who made use of strategies such as appropriation and montage in works that examine the proliferation of information in contemporary culture. Cynthia Fredette, Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 227. From his writings: I have been seduced by photography since I made my first prints in sixth grade. I printed negatives my father sent me from his travels around the world—the South American jungle, the Kremlin, Africa. My experience being director of Light Gallery in New York from 1975–78, working intimately with many of the most significant photographers—from Paul Strand, Kertész, Callahan, Siskind, Sommer, to Friedlander, Winogrand, Emmet Gowin, to Jan Groover, Stephen Shore, Robert Heinecken and Nick Nixon—certainly established a sense of the inexhaustible possibilities of the medium. Influences—I tend to be intrigued by individual images from all kinds of sources, high and low, rather than whole bodies of work by individuals. Among those who have been important for me are: Frederick Sommer, Josef Sudek, Piet Zwart, Jan Tschichold, Irving Penn, Charles Jones, James Nasmyth, Jaromír Funke. Also Philip Guston, Giorgio Morandi, Stuart Davis, Gertrude Stein. Selected Public Collections Philadelphia Museum of Art Morgan Library and Museum, New York Whitney Museum of American Art George Eastman House Princeton University Art Museum Museum of Modern Art, New York High Museum of Art, Atlanta National Gallery of Australia Metropolitan Museum of Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Center for Creative Photography, Tucson Cranbrook Academy of Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Baltimore Museum of Art Denver Art Museum Houston Museum of Fine Arts International Center for Photography Cleveland Museum of Art Polaroid Collection Goldman Sachs & Co. Florida State University First Boston Corporation Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris Brown University Ohio Wesleyan University Rhode Island School of Design Museum