Instant Painting, 1980

Instant Painting is part of a series of works made with Polaroid photographs that Richard Hamilton took in the early eighties. In 1977, when the Polaroid Corporation developed a large format camera capable of producing images of 50 x 60 cm, the company invited several artists to work with the camera as a strategy for introducing it among photographers and artists. Hamilton accepted the challenge. With the intention of obtaining a result that would be closer to painting than photography, he turned his work with the Polaroid camera into a laboratory on artistic production itself. He experimented with the lens and the proximity of objects, applied colour to the photographs, tore the protective adhesive of the photographic paper and played with other compositional tools. By blurring the boundaries between one genre and another, he turned the process of production and the final image into the same thing.