They are the Polaroid snapshots of members of Chicago’s film and video community, captured at work and in repose, during the last decades of the 20th century. Some of the subjects are well-known—there’s Kartemquin founder Gordon Quinn in one photo with noted video editor Eve Saxon, smiling at some long-ago party. And there’s noted anchorman and documentarian Bill Kurtis in another, with companion Donna LaPietra, also mugging in a festive atmosphere. Other people are less prominent, like Diane Abt, a street reporter for WBBM during the 1960s and ’70s, seen with a script in hand, seated at a tape-to-tape video-editing console, working on an undetermined video project.
The Polaroid Wall chronicles an important development in Chicago: the rise of independent film and video production in the city. “When no one had the tools, we were able to provide them,” Jacobs says. “The idea was to empower independent producers to make things, and there’s nothing more powerful than having your own editing equipment.”
Another former partner, Tom Shea, digitized the photos for the Polaroid Wall, and IPA clients Scott Munn, Casey Stockdon, and David Zerlin provided the design and app programming.
Jacobs also compares the Polaroid Wall to Middlemarch, George Eliot’s famous novel about life in a fictional British town in the early 19th century, told through the eyes of a number of characters. As Middlemarch depicts Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the Polaroid Wall is a visual catalog of Chicago in the midst of another revolution, according to Jacobs.
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