Floating on a Chemical Sea

When the Polaroid Corporation launched the now-iconic SX-70 system in 1972, it represented a series of technological breakthroughs. The color film developed automatically, and the collapsible camera was the size of a paperback. Polaroid marketed the product to consumers for everyday use, but the artist Lucas Samaras deployed it to more subversive ends. He pressed and gouged the film’s viscous emulsion, causing his pictured body to ripple, undulate, and appear to float within a sea of chemicals. This essay reconsiders Samaras’s “psychedelic emulsive-bodies” through the methods of new materialism, which emphasizes the distributed agency of both human and nonhuman actors. Such an analysis allows us to make sense of Samaras’s unique practice in both formal and historical terms. The relationship between body and chemical apparent in his series of Photo-Transformations echos the era’s countercultural politics of psychedelia, wherein an emancipatory politics can be found in an unlikely place: the corrupted emulsions of Polaroid’s mass-marketed picture technology.