Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroid collection to auction

A collection of Polaroids by legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is to sell at Bonhams.

The set consists of 257 pictures and has been split into 29 lots, each made up of nine or 10 shots.

Andrei Tarkovsky Polaroids
The Polaroids display a suitably Tarkovskian aesthetic


Values range from �20,000 ($26,328) up to �37,000 ($48,708).

It's expected to make around �500,000 ($658,015) in total.

The vast majority of the Polaroids were taken during shooting for Nostalgia (1983), one of Tarkovsky's most celebrated films.

It was filmed in Italy, making it the director's first movie outside the USSR.

Daria Chernenko, head of Bonhams' Russian art department, told the Guardian: "These photographs were intensely personal to him.

"Once he discovered the Polaroid camera, friends recall him with it always in his hand.

"And his son told me that when his father travelled, he carried the entire collection of Polaroids with him everywhere he went.

"Every image was personally chosen: some are quite misty, but they are ones he wanted to keep - as he took them, he routinely burned the ones he was dissatisfied with."

Tarkovsky is best known for his metaphysical sci-fi movies Solaris and Stalker.

His uncanny style of filmmaking gave cinema some of its most memorable imagery.

Chernenko went on: "The dream-like compositions are reflective of his filmmaking. They've never been on the market before and now his family are selling the collection in its entirety.

"There has already been a significant amount of interest in these one-off works, both from museums and film institutes."

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