This artist feature series explores the unconventional approaches of creators who push the boundaries of their medium. As a creative agency, we're constantly inspired by artists who challenge conventional thinking and embrace experimentation. Their processes and unique perspectives help us reimagine what's possible in our own storytelling.
In an age when everyone has a high-resolution camera in their pocket, Aidan Avery chooses to work with degraded Polaroid film, homemade pinhole cameras, and photographic techniques from the 1800s. His photographs seem to exist outside of time. Images that couldn't be made by anyone else because they emerge from happy accidents and chemical reactions that can never happen the same way twice.
The pivotal moment came when Aidan discovered instant photography. Until then, he had only dabbled in still imagery. "Ultimately, Polaroid film hooked me. At some point early in graduate school, when I hadn't shot photography in a few years, I bought a Polaroid SX-70 camera on Craigslist. I didn’t think a lot of it. It just seemed like a low-stakes and fun way to start making images again. But using that camera grabbed me immediately, from the test shot I took in the parking lot while buying it."
“I feel that Polaroid photography occupies this satisfying middle ground. It's just the right amount of instant gratification—not immediate, but close enough that you get to feel the excitement build and release in just a few minutes. Plus, the lo-fi look and vibrant colors are alluring."
The medium's simplicity is its strength. "In a weird way, even though Polaroid chemistry is so complex, Polaroid photography itself is very simple. Aim, focus (or sometimes the camera even does that for you), and shoot. Most Polaroid cameras don’t have many manual functions. That simplicity really let me focus on the images themselves and the learning that accompanied creating them."
His fascination soon expanded beyond modern Polaroid film to expired Polaroids and other discontinued film stocks.
"There are so many incredible types of Polaroid film that aren't produced anymore. But sometimes the old boxes still work anyway. Well, kind of. With age, the film's colors shift, textures show up, weird chemical artifacts happen. That's not how the film was meant to look, but it can be magical in its own way."
"I spent a lot of time playing with the idea of what can be done with something that is 'obsolete' and how [to] make use of an artistic medium in a way other than it was intended to be used. I tried every kind of old Polaroid I could find; I started shooting Kodachrome through a homemade pinhole camera and processing it in black-and-white; I started printing images in the darkroom on papers manufactured by companies that had gone out of business decades ago."
He draws a parallel to music, referencing an interview with Jack White: "I once heard Jack White get asked why he plays an old, poorly setup guitar with high action, which makes it much harder to play. He said that the difficulty of playing the instrument at all—that he had to exert himself to even get the instrument to play, much less play well—forces something out of both him as a guitar player and the guitar itself that he wouldn't get from playing a well set-up, smooth-playing guitar. In my experience, there's something to that."
"It's a misconception that Polaroid film can't be high-fidelity," he notes, though he acknowledges that many of the highest quality Polaroid films have been discontinued. "I don't mind working with low-fidelity mediums. Lower fidelity photography is not worse; it's just different. And that difference can be a strength."
This philosophy of creative constraint guides Aidan's experiments with obsolete materials. "What happens when I push this material to the limits of its usability? What happens when I push the medium in a way it wasn't meant to be pushed?"
He describes a memorable project of this nature: "A good example of this sort of work—and some of my work that has received the strongest response—is a series of gold prints I made using expired, long-discontinued darkroom paper with a golden base. The paper was from the '70s or '80s. It was so old that when I tried to develop it, it was extremely fogged and only the faintest image would appear. And, if I left it in the developing or washing trays for too long, the paper would disintegrate in my hands."
His solution required careful experimentation: "I started using an experimental developer to reduce the fog and reintroduce contrast. I had to find the sweet spot—enough time in the high-contrast developer, and at a strong enough dilution, that a dense image would appear, but a short enough time in the chemistry that the paper didn't start falling apart on me."
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Today, Aidan sees his work as operating in two distinct modes. In addition to being driven by an interest in materials, Aidan also photographs in a more conceptual way.
"Other work that I do is more subject-driven. In other words, my motivation to make the work comes more from the subject of the images than it does from the materials. This sort of work is very different from my work with Polaroids and other obsolete materials, but I think making this sort of work—work that is more concerned with saying something about the world rather than about the photographic materials themselves— is a natural progression as I become a more informed artist."
One of Aidan's most meaningful projects involves portraits of boxers—a subject far from his personal experience. "The portraits I've been making of young men involved in fight culture is a good example. That project is me trying to understand what has driven my younger brother to dedicate so much of himself to boxing, which is ultimately an activity that often harms one’s own mind and body. I photograph fighters, my brother included, as a way of understanding the community of men that choose this sort of self-inflicted danger."
He describes a favorite portrait session: "One of my favorite images I've made is a portrait of Emmanue'l, a boxer in Tucson. When making the portraits of young fighters I mostly use a large format camera, which means setting up really slowly and intentionally and going under the darkcloth to compose." The process creates a unique interaction. "During this process, I feel a mutual thing happening. The fighter—Emmanue'l in this case—is grappling with how to be comfortable in front of the camera. And I am grappling with how to relate to, and direct, a very masculine guy, and how to be genuine and relaxed with him. Since I am not a particularly masculine guy, that relationship doesn't come automatically to me. But as I start to get more comfortable with him, he starts to get more comfortable with me and the camera."
A happy accident produced one of his most striking images: "What makes this image for me now is something I didn't even see while shooting: that his face isn't the only thing in focus—his hands are also in focus. His hands, wrapped before his workout, happened to be the same distance from the lens as his face. It looks intentional in the image, but it wasn't. In hindsight, of course his hands should be in focus. It's a portrait of a boxer!"
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