My 15 minutes of Polaroid fame with artist Miles Aldridge
‘May we suggest . . . revelling in 15 minutes of fame’, reads the back page of House & Garden’s October 2026 issue. It extolled the virtues of booking a timed slot with the famed artist and photographer Miles Aldridge, whose itinerant Polaroid studio is part of this year’s Mount Street Neighbourhood Arts Festival (October 12-17), running concurrently with Frieze. The page was illustrated with a tetraptych of your writer, taken in May. In three of the pictures, I’m clutching a prop Aperol Spritz – appropriate for a shoot conceived at midnight on a boat on the Venice lagoon.
As an arts journalist and a repeat commissioner of images of myself (I’ve sat for the President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, stood for a nude bust, and, when younger, occasionally jobbed as an artists’ model) I’m acquainted with the plurality of a portrait’s value. It extends beyond visual appeal, to the specific time it represents, and the discovery in seeing yourself through another’s gaze. But, despite a career working with or adjacent to outstanding photographers, I’d never been the subject of a considered photographic portrait. Largely, I must confess, due to that well-known saying: ‘the camera never lies.’
We were admiring Chris Levine’s emerald-green Higher Power beam, which reached high into the skies above the island of San Clemente, when the proposal came. I had been wittering at Miles about my Vogue Italia archive, kept, in part, for the legendary cinematic shoots he did for the magazine in the noughties. I paused; I’m definitely not Kristen McMenamy, or Lily Cole, or Carmen Kass, or any of the other big-name models who became his muses. But Miles explained that he’d brought his ‘quick kit’ over for the opening week of the Biennale d’Arte, and I was intrigued.
There is lineage to this project. Travelling photo studios have existed since the 1850s, though while once they toured seaside resorts, Miles takes his to major artworld gatherings. After Frieze, he’s crossing the Channel for Art Basel Paris. Meanwhile, the origins of Miles’s derive from his process. He still works entirely with film, and ‘when I was shooting for Vogue and Vanity Fair, I’d use Polaroids to check every detail of the composition. They were a stepping stone – and yet there was always something magic there.’ He’s published two books based on his archive, Please Return Polaroid and Please Please Return Polaroid.
Then, they became a solution. In 2024, Miles was asked to photograph Sir Elton John for the cover of Time magazine – in 15 minutes. ‘I realised a photobooth only takes four,’ he says. So successful was the portrait, ‘and so enjoyable’, that he decided to extend the idea. He cites further artistic ancestry: in 1920s Paris, the Photomaton was embraced by Surrealists André Breton and Salvador Dalí, while Andy Warhol’s relationship with the Polaroid is well-documented. It’s Warhol, too, who provided inspiration for Miles’s title: ‘15 Minutes of Fame’.
Miles is fascinated by ‘the psychodrama of people’s lives,’ and recounts his approach as ‘taking something from reality, and exploding it into something bigger, like something from a Hollywood musical.’ Key is lighting, which he designs specifically, along with his vivid orange curtain, and props. The props have their own dichotomy. They’re serious in their referral to Renaissance portraiture’s symbolism and Lucian Freud’s psychological conduits of tension and menace (see his 1947 portrait of Kitty Garman, Girl with a Kitten) – and simultaneously not serious at all: among other items, Miles offers a feather boa, a vintage telephone, movie popcorn, a skull, and oversized sunglasses.
Indeed, Miles describes them as ‘telegraphing fun’, and ‘allowing people to inhabit a fictional side of themselves’ – while acknowledging that often they’ll out a truth, even if he’s made the suggestions. When I was photographed, I had three urgent deadlines, my book was four days from being published, and my son was five days from starting his GCSEs. I was thus operating on almost zero sleep – and, to compound the scattered anticipatory anxiety, had accidentally failed to pack my make-up bag and was wholly baffled by the hotel hairdryer. Miles’s selection of the Aperol Spritz, a cigarette and an ice-cream was perfect (even at 10am.)
The shoot was as speedy as its title promises (my sitting for a drawing, in comparison, was five hours) and more delightful than I imagined possible; Miles describes the sessions as comparable to ‘a spontaneous dance’. Most importantly, I love the result. ‘The camera might not lie, but it can transport,’ identifies Miles – which also comes down to his expert lighting. (Though notably, Warhol’s favouring of Polaroid was linked to its ironing out of lines.)
But beyond being pleased with my appearance, Miles has eternalised a moment of joy in a city that I adore. Moreover, there’s something jewel-like about the physical scale of this artform, a sense exacerbated by its high-gloss finish, making it akin to a contemporary Elizabethan miniature. Important to know is that Miles has plans to turn the project into a book and an exhibition (several of his works are already in the National Portrait Gallery collection) – and confesses that it’s therefore unlikely to run indefinitely. So, may we suggest . . . . booking it now?
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