Linda McCartney. The Polaroid Diaries

Following her best-selling TASCHEN monograph Life in Photographs, discover a more intimate and highly personal side of Linda McCartney’s photographic work in The Polaroid Diaries.

The collection focuses on McCartney’s distinctive way of seeing the world and her family, through charming and quirky portraits of Paul McCartney and the couple’s four children. We see them pulling faces and in matching pajamas. We see James pouring water on himself, and Mary and Stella playing dress-up. There’s dancing, eating, horse riding, and countless moments of everyday life on their farm in Southern England.

As Paul says in the introduction: “She would just see things. Many of her photos, it’s just that one click. You’ve got to recognise when a great photo is happening in front of you. And then you’ve got to snap it at exactly the right moment… And she did that so many times that it always impressed me.” The Polaroid Diaries curates more than 200 of these “right” moments from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, along with a foreword by Chrissie Hynde and an essay by art critic Ekow Eshun.

The book also features luminous landscapes across Scotland and Arizona, as well as the odd celebrity, as the likes of Steve McQueen and Adam Ant wander into the frame. Other pictures attest to her love of animals, with compassionate images of cats, lambs, horses, and hens. It’s a pre-Instagram glimpse into the life of an extraordinary family, a celebration of Linda’s legacy as a fiercely committed artist and of the instant magic of Polaroid film.