Polaroid's giant 20x24 camera hits the road on world tour

Polaroid’s 20x24 camera is so large it cannot fit on a plane, yet the foundation has taken the two-meter-tall studio machine on a world tour anyway. That contradiction is the point. In an age built around portability, the 20x24 keeps making the case for size, presence, and the kind of instant print that turns a sitting into an event.

The project is running through the Polaroid Foundation’s YouTube channel, which has been posting recent episodes and shorts as the camera moves from one collaboration to the next. One of the current runs features Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, and the broader video series has also named Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jim Shaw, Liu Wei, Mariko Mori, Carsten Höller, Lee Ufan, Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, and Anna Franceschini. This is not being framed as a nostalgia act. It is being presented as an active artist project built around the camera’s scale and the patience it demands.

That patience is part of why artists still chase the 20x24 look. A print this large carries a different kind of depth and physical presence than a standard instant frame, and the process forces a slower, more collaborative pace between photographer and subject. There is no rapid-fire workflow here, no digital safety net, no stack of near-misses to sort through later. There is just one oversized instant print, and the whole room has to work toward it.

The camera also sits inside the company’s own history. Polaroid says it was founded in 1937 by Edwin Land, introduced the Polaroid Land camera in 1947 as the genesis of instant photography, and launched the SX-70 in 1972. That lineage makes the 20x24 feel less like a museum oddity than the extreme end of a system that has always valued the physical print. Polaroid’s current integral films, with a 3.108 x 3.024-inch photo area, look tiny beside the 20x24’s output, which is exactly why the big camera remains a special-purpose studio instrument rather than a consumer product.

The tour has already reached the Venice Biennale, which the project describes as the oldest and most prestigious art exhibition in the world, and it places the camera inside an 18th-century palazzo in the north of Venice. That setting matters as much as the hardware. A machine too big to travel easily is also a machine that makes travel itself part of the story, turning instant photography back into something staged, communal, and impossible to reduce to a file.