The death of Polaroid as a format has been foretold often. But it persists. Boris makes nearly all of his personal photography with any Polaroid film he can obtain. For this series he made light paintings using outdated Polaroid film. With an unpredictably shifted color spectrum, his images seem at once slyly commercial and instantly antique.
Boris photographed young couples who regularly gather at night by the dozens, sometimes hundreds, on the Long Bien Bridge where the air is cooler in the summer. With exposure times of typically one minute, the people in Boris’s photographs had to hold completely motionless as he stepped into the frame with a Xenon flashlight to place the light precisely where he chose. The original, one-of-a-kind Polaroids are scanned and exhibited with the border intact.
Biography
After years working as a fashion photographer in France, Boris Zuliani found himself at the airport with 121 kilograms of Polaroid film, en route to Vietnam. As soon as he settled in Hanoi, he joined the photo agency NOI Pictures. He is now based in Vietnam and continues to work all over Southeast Asia, mainly in fashion and advertising. He works with medium and large formats, both film and digital. He is also working on a documentary project using all types of Polaroid instant film, capturing images of people in numerous locations including Argentina, Cambodia, China, Europe, Philippines, Thailand, USA, and Vietnam. In 2010, Boris was chosen to be a part of The Impossible Project (www.the-impossible-project.com), an organization that takes as its mission to restore and revive the use of Polaroid film.