Lucas Samaras

Throughout his career Samaras has obsessively made portraits and self-portraits in a variety of mediums, from drawing to sculpture to photography to video. In 1969 he began to experiment with Polaroid instant prints, which until the advent of digital cameras were the only medium that permitted a photographer to see an image soon after making an exposure. That capability was appealing to Samaras because it allowed him, while working alone, to repeatedly revise the outlandish settings, costumes, and performances from which he derived his self-portraits.
For more than a decade, each new Polaroid product prompted Samaras to embark on a fresh suite of experiments. Panorama belongs to a series he began in 1982. For each image the artist made several eight-by-ten-inch Polaroids of a single figure. He then cut each print into strips of equal width and reassembled them to create an elongated hybrid image. This simple technique stretches the figure as a fun-house mirror would, yielding the quality of theatrical fantasy that permeates all of Samaras's work.