Photographer Jeff Lipsky Shares His Polaroid Years

A sampling of Polaroids taken by photographer Jeff LIpsky.

By Laurel Busby

News & Information Editor

Jeff Lipsky has a fondness for Polaroids.

As a celebrity photographer for Esquire, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, and other magazines, Lipsky initially used large-format Polaroids as test photos before shooting with film. Unlike the rapid-fire photography of today’s digital age, each Polaroid took up to 10 minutes to shoot, and, while the magazines used the film photos that followed, he saved thousands of these Polaroids, which are one-of-a-kind images that have developed a patina with age.

“I’ve kept every Polaroid I’ve ever shot,” Lipsky said. “I look at the Polaroids and say, ‘I can’t believe I shot that in 1 frame.’ Today, it’s 50 frames.”

A selection of these Polaroids, which were taken between 2001-2010 of a vast range of celebrities, including Dustin Hoffman, Lindsay Lohan, Ryan Gosling, former Canyon resident Daryl Hannah, Eva Mendes, and Francis Ford Coppola, will be on exhibit at Gallery 169 beginning Oct. 11. An opening reception of Jeff Lipsky: The Polaroid Years will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday.

The presentation will include collages of Polaroids, enlargements of individual Polaroids, and sequences from particular shoots. Lipsky also plans to hang sheets of metal and place magnetized Polaroids on them in interesting arrangements.

Photographer Jeff Lipsky

“I love the intimacy of the gallery for my show,” Lipsky said. “I came up with the Polaroid show because the gallery inspired me. It’s the perfect size. Everything about it is perfect for my show.”

For Lipsky, his Polaroids offer a treasure trove of memories. Early in his career, he got a big break when a magazine sent him to the Sundance Film Festival to do portraits of the varied actors there. At one point, he was taking a tight shot of Sam Elliott and accidentally called the actor Sam Shepard, who was coming to pose next.

“Elliot gave me this huge grin, and … I got my favorite photo of all time of him with his big mustache grin,” said Lipsky, who will feature some of the other Polaroids from that session in the show.

Other favorite photos are of late actor Paul Walker, who Lipsky photographed frequently.

“I have the largest archive of Paul,” Lipsky said. “He was a wonderful person. He was the opposite of Hollywood. He just wanted to be on his boat having fun.”

Lipsky went out with Walker on the motorboat, a high-speed, hard-hull Interceptor, that the actor would take to the Channel Islands, and Lipsky conducted some shoots as they rode across the ocean.

Actor Paul Walker in one of LIpsky’s Polaroids.

Daryl Hannah, a friend from Lipsky’s pre-Hollywood days when he was a snowboard instructor and fly-fishing guide in Telluride, was the subject of his first celebrity photo shoot. At the time, both lived in the Canyon, and he was a photography assistant at Smashbox Studios. The Hannah shoot helped to propel his career forward.

“These Polaroids mean a lot to me,” Lipsky said. “This is my ode to analog.”

The ink and colors of the Polaroids have a unique quality, Lipsky said. For color, he generally used large-format 4”x5” Polaroid film (Type 59 for color or Type 55 for black and white). The latter was developed with famed photographer Ansel Adams, and both films produced both a positive and negative image, which required a chemical fixer to keep the image from vanishing. If it wasn’t spread properly, streaks formed.

“As the Polaroids have aged, there’s a beautiful patina that you can’t replicate,” Lipsky said.

A Baltimore native who studied advertising at Boston University, Lipsky moved to Colorado after graduating in 1988. Ten years later, he came to California to advance his photography career. Now married to Palisades native Jill Ennis Lipsky with three children who attend PaliHi, he moved to Santa Monica Canyon after the Palisades Fire damaged the family’s Marquez Knolls home and destroyed their two rental properties.

Luckily, all of his Polarioids were safe in his Santa Monica photography studio, and he has been enjoying going through them and creating the exhibit, which captures an earlier time when magazine publishers rather than social media steered the cultural discourse.

“I was shooting Polaroid when editorial was in its heyday,” Lipsky said. “Magazines were the influencers. There was a prestige in shooting a cover of a magazine…. The creative freedom you had was incredible…. The editors respected you … and picked you because of your style.”

(Jeff Lipsky: The Polaroid Years will be at Gallery 169, 169 W. Channel Rd., from Oct. 11 until Dec. 3 by appointment.)

Actor Adrien Brody in a Lipsky Polaroid.