The Lovely Road
(2001-2010)
The Lovely Road is a collection of several thousand unique polaroid photographs I shot during ten years of travel across the United States with the same Polaroid 600 camera my grandparents used to document my childhood. The Polaroid satisfied both my interest in creating a document of my newfound independence and curiosity of early adulthood as well as satisfying my (now lifelong) urge to collect via the soothing uniformity of the square formatted instant print. The subject matter (buildings, signs, highways, trash, ephemera) were likewise captured in a matching uniform composition of near expressionless portraiture. Seeing the images en masse it become evident to me that they were a singular piece and that the act of collecting the physical prints were of equal importance to me as creating them.
Portraits of me taken with the family Polaroid.
1983, 2003
The New Yorker
The road trip has inspired American photographers from Walker Evans to Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore. Hammond, who lives in Ohio, joins their ranks with a show of unpretentious color Polaroids he took while driving cross-country between 2001 and 2010. Like Evans (who favored Polaroid film late in his career), Hammond pays attention to road signs, vernacular architecture, and detritus, but he’s most attuned to simple pleasures: a hand holding a snow cone, a body about to hit water, clouds lit by a sunset. [MORE]
AnOther Magazine
Scott Hammond, #88 Cuba, NM, 2005
A specialist in polaroid photography, Scott Hammond’s work is the spirit of holiday in 3 1/4 X 3 1/4”. A fan of the polaroid because of the imperfections of the process and the singularity of the results, Hammond has created a body of work that celebrates the incidental, saturated shot. [MORE]
L. Parker Stephenson PHOTOGRAPHS
SCOTT HAMMOND
THE LOVELY ROAD
Journeys Through the U.S.A.
#56 Denver, 2005 Leeta, Sarasota, FL, 2007 Columbus, OH, 2005
L. Parker Stephenson Photographs is pleased to present an exhibition of Scott Hammond's Polaroids. An Ohio based photographer, Hammond (b. 1981) took trips around the country, from 2001 -2010, making pictures with his grandparents' Polaroid 660 instant camera of things that caught his eye along the way. We invite you to an opening reception on Thursday, April 9th, 2015 from 6-8pm and to the Gallery's booth (#216) at AIPAD's Photography Show where his work will be featured to meet the artist on Saturday, April 28th.
In this digital age, Scott Hammond's work resonates with the prevalent urge for the quick snap, the selfie, proof that I Was Here. However, in contrast to the infinitely reproducable non tangible 1s and 0s of the digital file, the Polaroid (discontinued in 2008) offered a pocket sized unique artifact of a time and place. There is nothing particularly special about the subjects Hammond chooses, yet, out of an admitted compulsion to collect, along his trips to nowhere he gathers and accumulates bits of the rural and suburban American landscape; a small moment or sight he feels is worthy of being preserved. He calls it "idealizing the ordinary".
Present in the images are echoes of Walker Evans' obsession with signage and architecture, William Eggleston's use of color, Stephen Shore's choice of mundane scenes, as well as elements from other iconic American photographers' work. In Hammond's case, the Polaroid's saturated colors and grainy images coupled with his humorous, odd or totally banal subjects, pre-framed in a small square format, present a singular vision that is simultaneously retro and contemporary in flavor. [MORE]
Addendum
(2021-2022)
The Odessa Jack Rabbit, Odessa, Texas.
2001, 2021
