Robby Muller L.A Polaroids

Robby Muller. Independant cinemas genius cinematographer's new and sadly posthumous book L.A Polaroids. Texts by Alex Cox, Willem Dafoe, Barbara Scharres. Andrea Müller-Schirmer and Wim Wenders.

In the 1980s, the acclaimed Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller spent months at a time away from home, collaborating with renowned directors such as Alex Cox and Wim Wenders to create some of the decade’s most influential films such as Repo Man , Paris, Texas, Barfly and To Live and Die in L.A..

After long days on set, Müller stayed at the Kensington Motel in Santa Monica, a simple apartment hotel just behind Ocean Boulevard and steps from the beach. He liked its plain comforts: an ironing board folded into the wall, a coffee pot bubbling on the stove, Garfield the hotel cat who kept him company. It felt familiar, not just a place to pass through.

He always carried his SX-70 Polaroid camera, making tender images when work paused, bringing what William Friedkin called “a foreigner’s eye” to America: noticing details others missed, avoiding clichés, always returning to light and colour as his true subjects. In these Polaroids, Müller frames a Los Angeles that no longer exists: small rooms, edges of the beach, street corners, a city built for cars seen by a cinematographer who preferred to walk. They reveal a man far from home, looking for stillness and light in the spaces in between.

30 x 24cm. 96 pages. Linen Covered with silk screen print.