My first “viral” post was a feature I did on H.R. Giger. It’s long gone from our website, it fell victim to a purge we did when we first maxed out our shared server many years ago. He’ll forever be one of my favorite artists, someone who’s left an immortal legacy on underground dark arts. His mind worked in weird ways, so its cool to see into that strange mind through this collection of Polaroids he took of himself, his art, and models with his art. From the goofy self portraits to the sci-fi alien sex scenes, these photos are snapshots of his life and inspiration from the late 70s to the 90s. They were published by Antenne Books in a book called Polaroids, and you can check some of them out below.
Polaroids contains a selection of unpublished photographs from the personal archives of the Swiss artist and set designer H.R. Giger. Given the ephemeral nature of the Polaroid format, these are snapshots that the artist used as references for his own work as well as for process and work documentation. He personalized many of the Polaroids that customarily lay in piles around his crowded, darkly decorated home in Zurich by scratching, painting, and drawing over the motifs in a surreal and animating style. Casual and light in their approach, the photographs intimate sex, death, pop, and his inscrutable sense of humor. They provide a view into a corner of Giger’s world that until now had remained largely overlooked.
– Antenne Books
