The first decade of the twenty-first century—what are we calling it, again? The two-thousands? The aughts?—is far enough in the rear-view mirror that we can finally start seeing it as a discrete pop-culture era. Recent documentaries (“Reality Check,” “Quiet on Set”) have reckoned with the dark side of its television; books such as “Meet Me in the Bathroom” and “Girl on Girl” have dissected its music and misogyny. Its hipster fashion has been revived as “indie sleaze.” Like anything just old enough to be retro, the period both allures and repels. Sure, we were weirdly fixated on Paris Hilton, but some of us could really pull off those Buddy Holly glasses and skinny jeans.
A previously unpublished cache of Polaroids by Emily Shur, dating from 2002 to 2009, provides a portal to this distant age. At the time, Shur was an in-demand celebrity photographer for such magazines as GQ, Spin, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, Elle, and People, with subjects ranging from movie stars and rappers to the boy-faced Mark Zuckerberg. Some of her pictures capture the self-conscious whimsy that was popular in celebrity photography: kooky props, candy-bright flowers, stars posing in bathtubs or with corded landlines. Shur shot on a large-format camera, which required “a million light-meter readings,” she told me recently. Then she’d have the film developed at a lab. In the days before digital, she couldn’t see exactly how the image would turn out while she was on set. The best she could do was to take a Polaroid as a quick reference, then mark it up with directions (“BRIGHTER,” “MATCH”) for the lab.
The Polaroids were meant as throwaways—an intermediate step in a process that would culminate in a glossy final image—but Shur never threw them out. She kept them, in meticulously labelled IKEA drawers, at her home office, in Los Angeles. “I never wanted to get rid of them, because they’re one of a kind,” she said. “And the color palette is so specific. It’s actually very hard to get those tones on film.” Sometimes her favorite photos from a shoot were the Polaroids. “Maybe it’s a moment when the talent isn’t being too self-conscious, because they’re, like, Oh, it’s just a Polaroid. So they’re able to chill out a little bit and give you something that they’re not going to give you when you declare that we’ve started shooting for real.”
Revisiting the pictures recently, Shur realized that they represent a time capsule in two ways—culturally, since the faces on display capture a bygone era of fame, and technologically, since the rise of digital photography soon obviated the need for reference images. Shur’s first digital shoots were around 2006, but “I really tried to hold off as long as I could,” she said. “It’s a very different way of composing a picture. It’s a very different way of interacting with the subject.” Digital was quicker and cheaper, so magazines eventually started requiring it. But the instant results meant that celebrities (and their publicists and stylists) could hover over Shur’s shoulder. She missed the mystery of the large-format camera and the power it gave her.
Shur grew up in Houston and discovered photography in high school. Her bedroom walls were covered in torn pages from fashion magazines: “very nineties high-school vibes, like supermodels and Annie Leibovitz.” She studied photography at New York University and worked as a photo and art department assistant at Rolling Stone, until her boss told her, “I can tell you’re not loving this job. You want to be shooting.” In 2001, she got what seemed like her big break, a multipage spread of three car designers for Rolling Stone. At one of the shoots, someone broke into her car and stole her equipment. The next day was 9/11. She didn’t know what would happen to the car-designer feature, but it came out in the November issue. The following year, she landed her first gig for Interview, shooting up-and-coming musicians—one of whom was Avril Lavigne, who quickly became a household name. “Just having her in my portfolio was extremely big for me,” Shur said.
For the rest of the decade—the years represented by these Polaroids—she was booked and busy. “It was such a period of growth for me as a photographer,” Shur told me. “I really found myself, I’d say.” (She’s since released monographs exploring her travels to Japan and her neighborhood in L.A.) The Polaroids, meanwhile, tell some unexpected tales. Some of her subjects, then at the pinnacle of fame, have since gone down strange paths. Cheryl Hines, whom she shot for Entertainment Weekly, was known at the time for “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” One Polaroid shows a concept that wasn’t ultimately used, with Hines’s mascara running down her stoic face—a defiant-martyr look that carries an unintended irony, now that Hines is notorious as the wife of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Other Polaroids capture the musical moment: a grinning Ghostface Killah (“He was very bummed that he was smiling”); a shirtless Coolio (“Coolio was late”); a frilly Nicole Scherzinger, then the ascendant lead vocalist of the Pussycat Dolls. Kid Rock, whom she shot for Spin, at his property in Michigan, was known as a flashy country rocker and not yet as a Trumpist firebrand. The shoot, Shur said, involved a lot of “loud” poses of the artist in his “ugly leather jacket and hat,” but the Polaroid catches him looking uncharacteristically subdued at his keyboard: “I was unsure if he was going to be down to take those quieter pictures, and he was.”
Some of the male actors evoke the indie-boy cool factor of the time: Adam Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Sarsgaard. The “Scrubs” star Zach Braff, who defined a certain twee-depressive counterculture with his 2004 film “Garden State,” posed for Interview in a tweedy jacket. “I had a very innocent, professional crush on him at the time,” Shur recalled with a sigh. “I was, like, In another life, me and this nice Jewish boy from New Jersey could have been great.”
Mark Zuckerberg was still a hoodied Harvard-dropout tech phenom—not yet known for his Cuban-link chains and congressional testimonies—when Shur photographed him for Wired, at Facebook’s headquarters. Unlike many of her other subjects, Zuckerberg wasn’t a performer, and he was “difficult to break through to,” she recalled. In the Polaroid, he has the same dead-eyed stare that he had in every other picture she took. “I have a couple different Polaroids of him, and you almost can’t tell the difference.”
In the shoots she recalls most fondly, the subjects were collaborators, willing to go to eccentric places. Shur shot the fashion designer Jeremy Scott in her back yard at the time, in Echo Park, in front of her cow statue. Mike Gordon, the bassist for Phish, ended up in a bathtub with his instrument. “The progression to get to that shot was impactful for me personally,” she said. “I didn’t always know exactly how to ask for what I wanted, and he kind of offered it up.” Similarly, Danger Mouse decided that he wanted to pose with a guy dressed as the Grim Reaper and make grilled cheese: “That’s one of those pictures where I really felt, like, I fucking nailed this.”
Not all Shur’s Polaroids from the naughty aughties are of hip young talents. For People, she shot Tony Curtis, then eighty-three, lounging in his pool in Nevada and thrilled to his classic-Hollywood charisma. “There were old movie posters of him everywhere, and he was just so handsome,” she said. “It was real movie-star shit.” Photographing Jane Goodall, for Discover, Shur was determined to appear poised and professional, but “I remember being really frazzled,” she recalled. “We shot in a hotel room, and I was worried about her tripping on wires and cords. I was, like, Please, please, be careful! She said something, like, ‘Honey, I live in the jungle.’ ”
