Please Please Return Polaroid

Born in London in 1964, Miles Aldridge has published his photographs in such influential magazines as American and Italian Vogue, Numéro and The New Yorker. His solo exhibitions include those at Lyndsey Ingram in London, Reflex in Amsterdam and Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles, and his work is held in permanent collections such as the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum in London, the Fondation Carmignac in Porquerolles and the International Center of Photography in New York. Aldridge's books printed by Steidl include Pictures for Photographs (2009) and Other Pictures (2012).

Please Please Return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge's ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge's Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions.Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge's dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress "sketches," often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!