Tobias Titz interview: Polaroids 1998–2018

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of his award-winning Polaroid Project, I had the good fortune to sit down with the acclaimed German-born, Melbourne-based photographer Tobias Titz and explore the method and meaning behind some of his remarkable images.

Titz’s process involves taking two photos: one with the subject and one without. The second, empty negative is then handed to the subject where the resulting sketches, scribbles and messages form a permanent imprint on the image.

What was the inception behind the Polaroid Project? It has been described as a collaborative process, with you sharing authorship with your subjects. Was it always designed to be an ongoing work?

Yes, it came to me pretty quickly that it would be ongoing. I always enjoyed portraiture with the large format camera and I just wanted to include the person being photographed a bit more in the process. That’s when I came up with the idea of sharing the image making process so the person basically gets ownership of half of the image as they are actually etching into the negative.

The problem is I’m running out of film because they stopped making it in 2007. I still have a stockpile. When I heard that they stopped making the film, I had eight thousand bucks to my name and I invested it in the film. Since then, whenever it pops up on eBay I buy some more but it has tripled in price and it has become a bit unreliable as well because it’s so old.

What extra dimension does this collaboration bring to the images?

Normally you would take a photo of somebody and then that’s pretty much it for them. It’s very passive for the person being photographed and I wanted them to have a more active role in the process. It adds their input to it, it’s not just my view. So we get a bit of their insight and their story and their ideas because they are reacting to the portrait.

That expediency and speed of development, is that what drew you to working with polaroids?

For me it’s the perfect balance between traditional film and digital because it’s instant but with all the qualities of film and the tactile elements of it so they can actually hold onto the negative and etch into it and work with it. In some of the images on display you can even see the fingerprints of the person in the image, in the negative. It’s not on an iPad or anything like that. So for that kind of work it’s the perfect medium. If you’re shooting on normal film, you need a dark tent to unload the film then you have to put it in the tank and develop it and fix it … With a polaroid, you just pull it, wait a minute and then you’re there.

There’s always an element of surprise to it as well. Sometimes there are little mistakes in the border. It’s always different because it’s a chemical process, not a template on the computer. There is always this element of surprise.

You have worked extensively with Indigenous communities throughout Australia and they feature prominently in your work. How did you first become involved with those communities?

I was interested in Aboriginal art and culture already in Germany but when I got here I thought it would be great to visit some communities and involve Indigenous artists and people in the series. Because my impression has always been, and still is, that politically, there are a lot of decisions made for Indigenous people in Australia but they are not consulted enough.

When we started the project for the 1967 Referendum, I got in touch with the Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre and we developed that idea to do a series. In 2007 we did the project for the 40th anniversary, and then ten years later we did another project with the language centre in Kalgoorlie for the 50th anniversary. We asked people in the community to comment on the referendum. The idea was to give Indigenous people a voice, to ask them what they think because sometimes in Canberra they make decisions for them in how they should run their lives and how they should live and I actually wanted to hear what they think.

What role do you think your work, or art in general, has in the discourse surrounding some of these issues you capture? Not just your work with Indigenous Australia but also your Beyond Borders Asylum Seeker project.

Everyone talks about refugees and Canberra tries to lock them up somewhere on an island and keep them anonymous. They don’t want to show their faces, they don’t want them to come to Australia, they just want to treat them as a mass of people, not even human beings and I wanted to give them a voice. I wanted to find out what they went through before they came to Australia, what their reasons were and what their experiences were to give the whole debate a human face. Because if you talk to them, then you understand why they became refugees.

And it has a bit of a personal background as well because my dad was a refugee after the World War II. When he was two weeks old, the Russians came into his village and chased his family away and they could only take what they could carry. So there is a personal connection to that refugee story.

And everyone of these people has a family, a background, a story. They all have experiences. They are all individuals.

Polaroids 1998–2018, an exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of Titz’s Polaroid Project, is on now at the The Fox Darkroom & Gallery until Sunday, 8 April 2018.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Polaroids 1998–2018
The Fox Darkroom & Gallery, 8 Elizabeth Street, via laneway, Kensington
Till Sunday, 8 April 2018
thefoxdarkroom.com.au/polaroids-1998-2018-tobias-titz/