Auto Polaroid by Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras was made from 1969 to 1971 in his New York apartment and home-studio, centering mostly nude self-portraits on the artist's body and self-presentation. The title plays on the French autoportrait, linking self-portraiture to the camera's automatic, instantaneous, and intimate operation. Instant prints let Samaras work without a photographer or assistant, making privacy part of the method.
Samaras called the series a "presentation of myself" and said he liked "remaking myself in photography." The repeated act of posing, framing, and judging turned self-portraiture into psychological confrontation, as unfamiliar views of his body challenged a stable self-image. Nudity appears not as neutral documentation but as a deliberate claim to bodily self-representation shaped by his visual education. Later critics have read these shifting personae through theatricality, unstable identity, queerness, and self-invention.
Across hundreds of compact prints, his body appears from unusual angles amid reflections, props, sets, double exposures, and superimpositions. Still lifes and formal compositions also occur. Dramatic lighting creates extreme contrast, unusual shadows, and isolated areas of flesh, while linear or stippled black and colored ink reorganizes the frame.
The works were made with a Polaroid 360 Land Camera, whose immediate output created a rapid feedback loop between camera placement, performance, inspection, and revision. Samaras valued its deep blacks and whites, then answered underexposed or undefined areas by applying writing or Higgins ink with a fountain pen. He reversed the nib for fine lines and dots and used the pen's back for larger marks. This manual intervention differs from the wet-emulsion manipulation of his later SX-70 Photo-Transformations.
The project first entered print in Samaras's 1970 Art in America feature. A dedicated Pace Gallery exhibition followed in New York in 1971, alongside Samaras Album: Autointerview, Autobiography, Autopolaroid, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Pace Editions. The series later appeared at MoMA and the Whitney and entered both museums' collections, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2016, Craig F. Starr Gallery presented the first exhibition devoted solely to the project since 1971, bringing together more than fifty works, including the first image and previously unexhibited photographs.
