Untitled [4]

William Wegman began to use the large 20 × 24–inch Polaroid camera to photograph his Weimaraner dogs in 1979. This print is part of a seven-image composition featuring the legs of his dogs (shown below). Unlike the film Robert Heinecken used in his diptych (on view nearby), Wegman’s film did not require a protective coating—by the time this work was created, Polaroid films no longer had coaters. But a missing portion of the lower left corner of the image shows that the developing chemical did not spread evenly over the entire surface of the negative when the film was pulled out of the camera. Instant prints are sensitive to moisture, which limits the kind of adhesives that can be used to mount them, as is required for this floating presentation.