“Linda McCartney – The Polaroid Diaries” exhibition in Berlin

About

A new Linda McCartney exposition was organized in Berlin, from March 7 to September 5, 2020 (it was initially supposed to end on June 6, 2020).

From paulmccartney.com, January 31, 2020:

“She’d always just be looking for everyday moments that interested her rather than manicured scenes. She wanted real moments.” Mary McCartney

The exhibition at C/O Berlin from 7th March to 6th June 2020 will present over 250 of Linda’s Polaroids and a selection of vintage prints taken from her archive with many of the Polaroids dating back to the 1970s when instant photography was a new innovation, an innovation Linda was keen to test the boundaries of. The Polaroids on display are an intimate collection and insight into Linda’s memories and visual eye with each image unique to a specific moment in time and space. Linda McCartney . The Polaroid Diaries – exemplifies her gift for capturing the moment and is published by Taschen.

The singular magic that imbues Linda’s work lies in her masterful use of a photographic technique that renounces the photographic negative as a means of reproduction and relies on the uniqueness of a one-of-a-kind positive: the Polaroid—irreproducible, uncorrectable, always live.

The exhibition has been developed in cooperation with the Linda McCartney Archive. The opening will take place on Friday 6th March 2020, 7pm at C/O Berlin in the Amerika Haus at Hardenbergstraße 22–24, 10623 Berlin.

Linda McCartney . The Polaroid Diaries
7th March 2020 – 6th June 2020

From C/O Berlin:

Exhibitions
07/03/20 to 05/09/20
Linda McCartney
The Polaroid Diaries

A man stands in front of a modish red sports car. He wears absurdly large and bulky moon boots and a long black coat, his left hand raised in greeting. It’s quite an entrance, yet his gaze into the camera is wholly unassuming. The photograph of Paul McCartney was taken in the 1970s. The woman behind the camera was Linda McCartney, a photographer who had already made a name for herself with her portraits of famous personalities and musicians such as Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan. But as her life became more public, the subject matter of her photographs grew more personal, intimate and experimental. For decades, she took pictures of her family and their everyday surroundings, creating a panorama of unpretentious, sometimes very intimate moments that also document the evolving Zeitgeist.

How is the happiness, warmth, and harmony of family life conveyed in the photographic image? Linda McCartney’s photographs offer glimpses into the everyday life of an anything-but-ordinary family, and their naturalness is both surprising and captivating. The photographer’s clear gaze, understanding of visual composition, and empathy for her subjects allow them to appear vulnerable, approachable, and human. Unlike many of her contemporaries, McCartney engaged deliberately with the domestic and familial, and made this perspective the theme of her professional work. She saw her life as wife and mother not as a limitation but rather as an enrichment of her visual world. In her pictures, she reflected on both the medium of photography within the public and private worlds. The singular magic that imbues Linda McCartney’s work lies in her masterful use of a photographic technique that renounces the photographic negative as a means of reproduction and relies on the uniqueness of a one-of-a-kind positive: the Polaroid—irreproducible, uncorrectable, always live.

The exhibition at C/O Berlin presents over 250 Polaroids and a selection of vintage prints taken from her archive with many of the Polaroids dating back to the 1970s when instant photography was a new innovation, an innovation Linda McCartney was keen to test the boundaries of. The Polaroids on display are an intimate collection and insight into Linda’s memories and visualeye with each image unique to a specific moment in time and space. Linda McCartney. The Polaroid Diaries – exemplifies her gift for capturing the moment and is published by Taschen.

An exhibition produced by C/O Berlin Foundation in cooperation with the Linda McCartney Archive.
Curators: members of the McCartney Family and Felix Hoffmann on behalf of C/O Berlin Foundation, in collaboration with Sarah Brown on behalf of the Linda McCartney Archive.

Last updated on February 21, 2021