There is no clear disposition of the roughly 14,300 less valuable objects, which remain in the hands of whoever runs Polaroid as of August 31, when Polaroid converts from Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7. (Friday, August 28 is the last day for all employees, though some will transfer roles and become contractors.) Sotheby’s has, apparently, offered to serve as an agent for institutions that might want to acquire the collection. Although earlier attempts to find buyers, with the 1700 “cream” works still part of the bargain, met with no acceptable offers, the auction house now has the freedom to go through the entire collection and make unspecified further arrangements regarding the items it has been given permission to auction. […]
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If you have work in either the U.S. or European Polaroid Collections, want to prevent the destruction of this world-famous archive via sale of its individual works at auction, and want to establish your claim to ownership of works you deposited in that collection on long-term loan, the time to act is now. […] Should the collection get dispersed via auction or other sales, then the potential for research into Polaroid photography diminishes immediately and dramatically. The collection as presently constituted has an obvious synergy on numerous levels: it embodies a history of creative use of a particular cluster of tools, materials, and processes over six decades; it shows how different picture-makers used the same medium and the same materials; it represents the tangible cumulative result of an unparalleled program of corporate support of the arts; and it reflects the curatorial and sponsorial decisions of a sequence of thoughtful figures empowered by Polaroid to subsidize production and gather the consequent output. . . . […] |
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Guest Post 5: Federal Judge Sam Joyner on Polaroid
The third category of works, those of particular concern to us here, are those that entered the collection via a sale, donation, or barter arrangement that prohibited commercial use, reserved for the photographers the right in perpetuity to borrow the works for exhibition and publication purposes, did not specify transfer of ownership, and otherwise contain explicitly or implicitly encumbering language. Here too the court should determine this by examination of the relevant contracts and letters of agreement covering those works, whose sale to buyers not bound by the initial understandings between the Polaroid Corporation and the photographers would in fact constitute breach of contract. […]