Polly Borland

British photographer Polly Borland has always specialised in the offbeat, surreal and fringe. So when she heard about a secret club in which adult men spent weeks looking and living like babies, she first could hardly believe it  – but then set out to document it. 

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The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge takes the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Australia / New Zealand Magazine‘s June July 2023 edition lensed by photographer Polly Borland. In charge of styling was Jillian Davison, with set design from Patty Huntington. Beauty is work of hair stylist Clayton Hawkins, makeup artist Melissa Hernandez, and manicurist Vanessa Mccullough. For the cover Coolidge is wearing Dolce&Gabbana dress and Cartier jewellery.

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She may be alone in this, but Sydney Sweeney sure seems to like Anish Kapoor‘s new bean sculpture in Tribeca *** Carl Kostyál, Jerry Saltz, and Cameron Silver down in Marfa for the unveiling of Polly Borland’s new land art sculpture *** Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, Dasha Zhukhova, Sofia Coppola, and Nan Goldin at Gagosian’s afterparty for their Richard Avedon show at The Standard High Line

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Installed amongst the high Chihuahuan Desert plains, Polly Borland's BOD will be amongst the ethereal light and expansive space of far West Texas and the historied backdrop of Marfa.

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The Fourth Annual Marfa Invitational, a contemporary art fair that brings artists and gallerists from across the globe to showcase their work in the remote arts destination, will kick off on Thursday — as founder Michael Phelan’s pledge to bring a permanent outpost for his foundation to the outskirts of town comes closer to fruition.

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Polly Borland has made a career out of photographing others. Over the last several decades, the Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based artist has photographed the likes of Susan Sontag, Nick Cave, Cate Blanchett and Queen Elizabeth II. And now, for the first time in her professional life, Borland is turning the camera on herself. 

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Acclaimed Australian photographer Polly Borland has taken shots of many people in the nude and now, for the first time, she has turned the camera on herself. For her latest series, the 64-year-old uses her body as sculpture, literally squishing bits of it together to create slightly abstract, occasionally surreal and often playful works.

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Polly Borland is an Australian photographer who currently resides in Los Angeles. She is best known as a commercial photographer who specialized in editorial and portrait work. Her extensive resume and online portfolio reflects the scope of this impressive career. At Nino Mier, for the first time, she turns the camera on herself to create a highly personal body of work titled Nudie. Borland’s Nudies may be thought of as “selfies” — digital photographs made with an iPhone camera to share with an audience— as she even often creates them using a selfie stick, but unlike traditional selfies, these images are not about showing off where one has been or who one has been with. 

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For the solo exhibition “Nudie” Australian photographer Polly Borland has, after a long career, turned the lens on herself for the very first time. Using an iPhone camera, she challenges ‘selfie’ tropes and social media culture of self-worship and self-image through contorted, grotesque oversized nudes. These confrontational photographic prints amplify her aging body with tightly cropped frames that seem sculptural and surreal in their abstraction. The artist twists, kneads, flips and folds her body, handling her flesh like a malleable material while also steering her iPhone camera with a selfie stick. 

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Most photographers love having the ability to hide behind the camera, relishing the agency it affords them. Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based Polly Borland isn’t immune to these pleasures. “I like photography because it’s about control,” Borland says on a Zoom call from her native Australia, where she’s spent the entirety of the pandemic. Though Borland devoted the first three decades of her career to crafting decadent, erotic, and uncannily hypnotic images of others, she’s rarely trained her lens on herself. For her breakout series, The Babies, she documented a group of infantilist fetishists. 

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West Hollywood’s Nino Mier Gallery is the next art space to launch an online viewing room to support its entire roster of artists. Aptly titled “PAPER (and one on wood),” the digital presentation largely features works on paper with the exception of one piece on wood by both local and international artists.

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Some of Australia’s most respected and celebrated artists, including Polly Borland, Sonia Payes, Danie Mellor, David Rosetzky, Justine Varga, Stephen Dupont and Jacqui Stockdale – just to name a few, will be exhibited at Monash Gallery of Art from 5 October until 17 November 2019. Nearly 700 entries were received this year.

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When Polly Borland met Jacqueline Hunt and Patrick Blue of Jac+ Jack, it was love at first sight. A strictly professional and creative love, of course. While sharing the same building for their respective studios in Los Angeles, they bonded over their shared love for colour and texture. Jac+Jack commissioned the Australian artist to create a series of images, and thus their professional collaboration began. The Polly Borland Project Zine is the sum of these images.

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She counts Nick Cave as a close friend, has photographed Queen Elizabeth and Cate Blanchett and is married to Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat, who is best known for his film The Proposition. For all her black book high-fives, Polly Borland is a force in her own right, and now, in a career first, the NGV will honour the Australian artist with a retrospective, Polyverse.

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Photographer Polly Borland is not sure where her dark imagery comes from, but she suspects her home town played a part. "Maybe it had something to do with growing up in my household and the suburbs of Melbourne," she says. Speaking on the eve of her latest exhibition, she says that "Melbourne is infected by a darkness, maybe to do with its own history and the treatment of the Indigenous people of Australia ... I feel there's a stain on Australia right up to present day, seen with its treatment of adults and children seeking asylum on Nauru. It's horrifying how official policy can be so cruel and against all human rights".

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How much do you really know about adult babies? The sexual fetish – otherwise known as paraphilic infantilism – is probably one of the most maligned and marginalised in existence. Participants, in an effort to get turned on sexually, wear adult-sized nappies, shit themselves, and co-opt cooing, baby speak. Even for the carnally adventurous, it’s a lot.

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For the first time in over 15 years, prolific photographer Polly Borland is showing her photographic series, The Babies, a body of work that dives into the world of adult males role-playing as infants. As an aspect of fetish culture, male infantilism lacks the threatening power dynamic of BDSM, or the eroticism of photographs showing people at the moment of orgasm. For those interested, its attraction lies elsewhere. Through Borland's lens, the men—dressed in diapers and often sucking on a pacifier—look vulnerable and somewhat sad, but always desiring of comfort and care. 

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The first time Australian photographer Polly Borland heard about the Babies, she thought, "No, that couldn't exist." Her friend assured her it did. There were secretive clubs in England where adult men spent weekends dressing up as babies, napping in cribs, wearing and soiling diapers and sometimes even suckling a surrogate mother's teat. 

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It’s been 16 years since Australian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Polly Borland released The Babies, a book visually chronicling her extensive time spent over the course of five years with various communities of adult men who like to dress up as and act like babies. Yes, it’s a thing. And yes, when it was released, The Babies was subject to a range of reactions from the public, most of which hovered somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘totally freaked out.’ 

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