Introducing ‘Chocolate’
By Marc Lagrange

As of the late 1980’s Marc Lagrange devoted his life and work to the medium of photography and all who worked with him or followed his career closely know about his true passion for analog photography. As of the early 1990’s he started to work quite intensively with Polaroid film and his nudes, or portraits, as he would prefer to call them, found a more intense, more touching, more human look. The surface of these Polaroids and the longer exposure, inherent to these films, resulted in a deep and personal aesthetic quality of his photography. The Polaroid film eventually became his signature trademark. “Photos are taken by photographers not by cameras” was his saying and within this series of never before published work one can easily discern his particular photographic style and his quest to bring beauty to his
images and emotion to an audience.

The immediate image of the Polaroid Chocolate film became very important for Marc. Like many photographers at the time, he used the immediacy of the peel apart-films for test snapshots of a scene but he quickly started using it as a real medium. Polaroid 100 Chocolate film is one of the rarest films Polaroid ever made; because of its unique process it produces images starkly different from any other Polaroid film. The black and white/color cross-process method produces chocolate brown images with a warm texture and other special characteristics. His Polaroids

often contain a spontaneity and freshness, different from the final work, so he started creating his own, distinctive Polaroid style. Through the particular Polaroid technology, these images confirm their relation to a past reality. In that sense, these photographs are interesting because they stimulate both the desire to understand the world of beauty and to escape it. As per Marc’s words: “Therein lies the ambition: to place the durability and significant immobility of the photograph opposite the speed of our daily world. “My settings are places for dreams, for the imaginary to prevail.”

“After the success of the Timeless Beauty exhibition, where more than 40 000 people saw Marc’s work in the Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium last year, we felt it was the right time to share some part of our father’s unseen work he shot with Chocolate Polaroid. Next to the collection where we reveal new enlarged chocolate polaroids, we will release a new luxury photo-box, called “The Chocolate Box”. In 1998, Marc released his first ‘Black Box’ and he has always been very keen on the idea of bringing out a new one so we now wanted, in this particular way, to share some of Marc’s beautiful, never before published chocolate photographs with a broader audience and make a limited series and some original pieces available to collectors of his work around the world.”

– Vincent and Frederik Lagrange

The Chocolate Polaroid Exhibition

A series of carefully selected and never before published
artworks, shot by Marc Lagrange on Polaroid Chocolate.
The selected artworks are available in a limited series of 7.

3 different Sizes:

– Smal: 55 x 70 cm, framed 71 x 86 cm (ed. 7) White Floating Box
– Medium: 100 x 125 cm, framed 126 x 153 cm (ed. 7) White Floating Box
– Large: 150 x 190 cm, frameless Diasec (ed. 3)

Frame: Floating Box in massive ivory frame, museum glass. Next to these photos, a series of original and exclusive Chocolate Polaroids (1/1) will be shown and made available to the public for the very first time.