Polaroid Week: Urizen Freaza

Polaroid Week: Urizen Freaza by Michael HoneggerJune 4, 2025

©Urizen Freaza, DobleNike

Polaroid photography, with its distinctive immediacy and nostalgic charm, has long captivated artists seeking to push the boundaries of image-making. This week we spotlight five innovative Polaroid artists whose diverse practices explore the full spectrum of the medium’s creative possibilities—from experimental manipulations and emulsion lifts to hand-altered prints and conceptual storytelling. Each brings a unique vision to the format, demonstrating that the instant photo is a dynamic and thriving alternative.

In the hands of Urizen Freaza, a Polaroid artist, time is a constellation of fragments—each moment suspended, tactile, and trembling with potential. His work, composed of overlapping portrait emulsion lifts, pierced Polaroid surfaces, and eyes that are forever observing ,speaks to a reality not fixed but felt, where memory layers upon memory. His double portraits breathe through each other’s edges. These are not photographs in the traditional sense, but moments caught mid-transformation—instants becoming relics, images becoming matter.

©Urizen Freaza, Doble Anja

Threaded with yarn, punctured, and gently dismantled, Urizen’s Polaroid images become sites of both rupture and repair. Each manipulation—a stitch, a peel, a distortion, a duplication—acts as a meditation on presence and absence, visibility and veiling. Within his cosmology, instant photography becomes a kind of alchemy—a ritual where the act and the artifact collapse into one, held warm and blinking in the palm of the hand. Here, the photograph is no longer a window but a wound. A weave. A whisper of what was, altered by the very fingers that tried to preserve it. And in the tension, he creates—between the document and the dream—Urizen carves a new space for the photograph to live not simply as something seen, but as something intimately, irreversibly, discerned.

©Urizen Freaza, Doble Jenny

Urizen has a unique and challenging interpretation of instant photography. In his words: “According to quantum physics, the universe is quantified in packages of indissoluble units, small bricks that constitute our reality. According to this theory, not only matter, but also time is quantified. If we perceive our reality as a function of time, and if this one only exists as a succession of moments, then our reality is made out of instants and instantaneity is the only truth.

©Urizen Freaza, Doble Luisa

Polaroid photography bursts the barrier between the photographic act and the photographic piece, melting both elements in one single action that lasts seconds, turning a moment into something real and tangible. In front on your eyes. While you hold it in your hands. Instant Photography produces unique, a priori non-reproducible works, but also allows the tactile, direct manipulation of the photography, to turn it into an experience beyond the simply seen and more referred to as the perceived thing. The tension between those two elements: the pure realism of the moment and the capacity to manipulate it, is what makes Instant Photography such a powerful format.”

©Urizen Freaza, Doble Ian

Urizen’s work presented here is comprised of a number of his ongoing projects. “Dobles” is a series of emulsion lifts of color Polaroids on monochrome Polaroids. According to Urizen, “a portrait is by definition superficial, a two-dimensional representation of a person. In order to show the person, one layer doesn’t suffice. ‘Dobles’ is an attempt to show more through the juxtaposition and association of two or more emulsion layers.

©Urizen Freaza, Doble Anja

For the ‘hidden’ picture in the background only UV light was used. This light found in the part of the spectrum invisible to the eye, was meant as a tool to look behind, to see what was hidden. For this exposure the subjects were asked to look neutral or think about something intimate. For the color picture, they were asked to act ‘natural’ or smile, as they would for a normal snapshot. Both exposures are in fact somehow posed, there is no candid capture. But through the contrast or the association of both, a doubt is (perceived by) the viewer. The truth must be somewhere in between… or maybe further away.”

©Urizen Freaza, Stars On The Face

‘Masks‘ is another of Urizen’s Polaroid portrait series dealing with identity and the piercing of the image with yarn. As he notes: “We hide behind different masks that we use in different contexts. With social media, identity is no longer solid but a liquid abstraction. Photography has turned into a tool for its fiction. In the times of big data and automatic facial recognition, it’s not who you are, it’s what you show. Through the Polaroid, the image becomes an object, a link to the real world which is pierced and hidden under a simplified but aesthetically constructed mask.”

©Urizen Freaza, Ojos

Urizen Freaza is a self-taught photographer and filmmaker of Spanish origin who currently resides in Berlin, Germany. He has had a number of individual exhibitions and participated in various group exhibition throughout Europe and the United States over the past twenty years. He is a member of the 12.12 Project of Polaroid photographers.

Instagram: @urizenfreaza