Erotic Polaroids

"Girls," 1993, 24 polaroid photographs, 17" x 21"
Collection David and Monica Zwirner

"Boys," 1993, 24 polaroid photographs, 17" x 21"
Collection David and Monica Zwirner

An Excerpt from Sandra Firmin's Essay "Patricia Cronin's XX Portfolio":

Brooklyn-based artist Patricia Cronin began to work with the Polaroid camera in 1993, producing a large “shoebox archive” that documents a multiplicity of sexual lifestyles dominant in New York at the time. In contrast to her contemporary, photographer Catherine Opie, who received critical acclaim for her dignified studio portraiture of queer leather communities in California, Cronin’s snapshots are taken in the frenzy of participation. Emerging concurrently in the early 1990s, both Cronin and Opie offer a lesbian counterpart to Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial X Portfolio from the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which filtered multiracial sex acts and sadomasochism through a highly disciplined language of formal photography, merging homoerotic pornography and high art in the process.