For the remainder of the last decade—the years represented by these Polaroids—she was booked and busy. “It was such a interval of development for me as a photographer,” Shur advised me. “I actually discovered myself, I’d say.” (She’s since launched monographs exploring her travels to Japan and her neighborhood in L.A.) The Polaroids, in the meantime, inform some surprising tales. A few of her topics, then on the pinnacle of fame, have since gone down unusual paths. Cheryl Hines, whom she shot for Leisure Weekly, was identified on the time for “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” One Polaroid exhibits an idea that wasn’t in the end used, with Hines’s mascara working down her stoic face—a defiant-martyr look that carries an unintended irony, now that Hines is infamous because the spouse of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Different Polaroids seize the musical second: 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. Child Rock, whom she shot for Spin, at his property in Michigan, was referred to as a flashy nation rocker and never but as a Trumpist firebrand. The shoot, Shur mentioned, concerned numerous “loud” poses of the artist in his “ugly leather-based jacket and hat,” however the Polaroid catches him wanting uncharacteristically subdued at his keyboard: “I used to be uncertain if he was going to be all the way down to take these quieter photos, and he was.”
Child Rock, 2003.
Amanda Seyfried, 2008.
A few of the male actors evoke the indie-boy cool issue of the time: Adam Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Sarsgaard. The “Scrubs” star Zach Braff, who outlined a sure twee-depressive counterculture along with his 2004 movie “Backyard State,” posed for Interview in a tweedy jacket. “I had a really harmless, skilled crush on him on the time,” Shur recalled with a sigh. “I used to be, like, In one other life, me and this good Jewish boy from New Jersey might have been nice.”
