WITH the possible exception of the keyhole, there is no frame for an image more familiar than the white border of a Polaroid instant photograph. Anchored by a thick strip that acts as a plinth for the picture above, a Polaroid imbues even the hastiest snapshots with a certain artistic flair. When Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid, first unveiled his instant camera in 1947, such thoughts were at the front of his mind. “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic,” he declared, “to make available a new medium of expression to numerous individuals who have an artistic interest in the world around them.” This was not just product-launch hyperbole. By 1949, Land had placed Ansel Adams, a revered photographer of the American landscape, on a monthly retainer as a consultant.

When Land saw how useful Adams was in suggesting improvements to his product he began Polaroid’s Artist Support Program which offered grants of cameras and film to artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in order to have his products tested to their limits. As a result Polaroid amassed more than 16,000 fine-art photographs. This collection was both a technical and a visual documentation of the company’s products, and it helped to dispel any notions of disposability that the word “instant” implied. Even after Polaroid cameras became a mass-market commodity—in the 1960s almost half of America’s households owned one—Polaroid maintained a connection to the art world.

That connection is fully explored in “The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation”, the largest museum survey of artwork made with Polaroid cameras ever held in America, at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre at Vassar College in upstate New York. Bringing together some 40 artists from the launch of Polaroid’s ultra-portable SX-70 camera in 1972 until the present, this revelatory exhibition shows how Land really did create “a new medium of expression.”

The photographs taken by Ansel Adams, represented here by four tightly cropped colour studies, are a fine example of how the Polaroid technology encouraged artists to experiment with new ideas. The sumptuous tones in “Rusted Blue Metal”(1972)—mottled-ochre rust spots and deep worn blues—are an intimate counterpoint to the stark black-and-white landscapes stretching into infinity for which he is best known. For other artists the diminutive size of the Polaroid photo lends itself to montage. David Hockney’s dazzling portrait, “David Graves Pembroke Studios London Tuesday, 27 April 1982” (1982), is composed of 120 separate photographs that create an almost Cubist immersion in the subject. The Polaroids’ white frames give the piece a luminescent framework reminiscent of a stained glass window.

Freed from the judgmental eye of the photo developer, and police, the Polaroid was often favoured by those wishing to create intimate or explicit images. But the arrival of the SX-70 camera model in 1972, the lightest and easiest to use Polaroid yet, led to a boom in DIY pornography. Some insinuated that the model’s name was missing a vowel. Jack Butler’s “Sex 70s” series (1978, pictured right) plays with this new-found freedom, depicting magazine cuttings of females appearing to be undressed by the photographer’s oversize hand. Lucas Samarras went one step further. His “Photo-Transformations”series (1973-76) is a collection of nude self-portraits in which the Polaroid itself has been teased and tortured—its photographic emulsion worked with sharp implements and its chemicals baked or frozen, in order to create a sort of mutilated hallucination on the hinterland between photography and painting. Despite such obvious surface alterations, a Polaroid photograph has no separate negatives that can be manipulated and it cannot be seamlessly altered like a digital image. This gained it a reputation for being an authentic record of reality. Dash Snow plays with this idea of truth in a quasi-documentary series of Polaroids which invite the viewer to become a voyeur into his seemingly bohemian life (pictured above). Yet he has burnt and defaced the Polaroids themselves, hiding and disfiguring the characters within. Is this an extension of the violent debauchery evident in the photographs? Or a warning that even in Polaroids not everything should be believed?