Elijah Wheat is elated to present a solo booth at the inaugural PHOTOFAIRS, NYC, with the accomplished multidimensional photography based artist, Rhiannon Adam. Six of her latest series of unique work: “Composites,” will fill booth #124.

Adam, already acknowledged for her commitment and visual style to political portrait series of obscure communities, this body moves beyond the lens as she handcrafts a series of large-scale montages of Polaroid emulsion lifts. Landscapes are shot through a lens and fabricated fantastical locations emerge spanning time and geography. Each unique piece is created from a series of lifts, composited, montaged, and rearranged onto a new substrate, in this case, watercolor paper. The pieces are tactile and textural, and embrace error and imperfection.

Taking reference from the composite images created by the lunar surveyor that photographed the moon’s surface, these works occupy the boundary between fact and fiction. A Polaroid cannot be faked, and each one is a “true” original, but when composited in this way, a fictional landscape is built that encourages us to question what is real. This is an entirely analogue process, but can be seen to relate to digital compositing processes more commonly used in commercial photography.

The lifting process is a delicate one, where the Polaroid’s emulsion is removed from its native backing using boiling water, is cleaned and washed, and then finally transferred to the composition one by one. With each image, there is only one opportunity for a successful lift, with the fragile gelatinous image being prone to breakages. The oldest images must be treated differently than the newest shots during the lift process, as the material hardens over time.


Creating the imagery for each piece involves a painstaking gathering process, as each piece contains up to 150 individual Polaroids shot on expired Polaroid pack film which is increasingly difficult to obtain (the deadstock is so scarce, in fact, these may be the last works created with this type of Polaroid film). Individual images are photographed in situ at different locations and countries, some being a few years old before becoming a part of the final work. The translucent nature of the lifts must be considered at all times during shooting, with each image being purposefully overexposed to create an airiness and lightness, allowing them to be layered. Though the process is photographic, each work avoids replication.

In these montages, the influence of her impending journey to space (through the DearMoon competition) is subtle, emerging through pictures of rocket launches alongside subtle nods to Martian landscapes.

BOOK SIGNING | ELIJAH WHEAT | BOOTH 124

Rhiannon is also the author of three books, and we will host a short talk and book signing of Polaroid: The Missing Manual, at the fair, Saturday, 9 September at 1:30pm

Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017, reprinted 2022) her exhaustive resource on instant photography.

Her other award winning books include: Big Fence / Pitcairn Island (Blow Up. Press, 2021), Dreamlands / Wastelands (Jane & Jeremy, 2014).

BIO: Rhiannon Adam is a photographic artist, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1985. She currently lives and works between London and the US.

In 1992, her parents sold everything they owned and bought a live-aboard sailing boat, Jannes. From that point, her childhood became nomadic, moving from place to place, mainly around South America and the Caribbean. She eventually moved to London as a teenager to live her with aunt, enabling her to begin mainstream education. She later studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and at the University of Cambridge.

Adam’s work is centered on research-based, long-form, social documentary projects that make use of analogue photographic processes and archive materials, as well as her on-going obsession with Polaroid and the materiality of the photographic image. Her early life experiences have had a lasting influence on her work, with a focus on remote communities, the concept of utopia, and the fine line between fact and fiction.

She has been shortlisted for, and won, numerous awards, including the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography and was named as one of The Photographers’ Gallery’s New Talents in 2019. Her work has been published widely in the press, including Le Monde, The Telegraph, the BBC, The British Journal of Photography, Stern, Huffington Post, and the New York Times.

She is the author of three books, Big Fence / Pitcairn Island (Blow Up Press, 2021), Dreamlands / Wastelands (Jane & Jeremy, 2014), and her exhaustive resource on instant photography, Polaroid: The Missing Manual (Thames & Hudson, 2017, reprinted 2022).