Donna Trope celebrates the power of the Polaroid in Paris

With ‘Donna Trope, Polaroids’, at Galerie Carole Lambert in Paris from June through 24 September 2025, the renowned beauty photographer honours the quieter section of her vast archive. Rarely-seen-before images from her collection of some 25,000 physical Polaroid prints celebrate Trope’s decades-long relationship with the instant photograph, curated in collaboration with Fany Dupêchez. ‘Polaroids used to be my rejects, and now they are my holy grail,’ Trope tells Wallpaper* in an email. ‘A way for me to work through a visual problem and get to my goal – that of the final “finished’ image – they are the unseen method of operating.’

Born in Los Angeles before relocating to London in her late teens, where she would learn to use a camera and, soon after, land her first campaign (a year-long contract with the make-up giant Max Factor), Trope spent much of the 1980s and 1990s distorting mainstream perceptions of beauty and revising the more straightforward designs of what a beauty image could look like. In the early 1990s, an editorial with stylist Katie Grand for the 14th issue of Dazed, ‘Preservation Vamp’, saw her work labelled ‘disgusting’ by a top model agent; in subsequent years, her distinctive visual language has seen Trope widely admired across the beauty industry, with several pieces acquired by institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

‘I was using photography to enhance what I saw to a vision of how I liked to view it,’ she says today, reflecting on how her early ideas about beauty and aesthetics informed her practice. ‘The concept of beauty is simply something visual that we personally aspire to, some more than others. To attain beauty, to own it, to become what we desire is a dream, however basic and simple, of the narcissist. It can be seen in two ways: that of damage control, and that of accentuating the good first and foremost and of camouflaging the bad: it’s an illusion, and we have the power to control illusions, thus to control beauty, now more than any time in history.’

After Max Factor, followed other heavyweights – from Revlon and Maybelline, to Aveda and Sephora, as well as publications including Vogue and The Sunday Times Magazine – and, more recently, Trope has collaborated closely with Kim Kardashian’s Skims. ‘I have always loved beauty!’ she offers, recalling her introduction to the industry’s commercial side. ‘To see a face and body, each as its own tiny world, a landscape with hills and valleys. To become the architect of a face...to alter the illusion with powder paint pulling, as well as light and angles, is what I think of as pure magic! It’s smoke and mirrors in the positive. Use them not as a lie but as a reality.’

While negotiating colour and light is a cornerstone of her practice (the cover of her cult 2001 book Beauty Shots, for example, featuring a model’s side profile as a cigarette is stubbed onto her cheek, is undoubtedly more powerful as a result of its bright palette and high shine), Trope’s Polaroids exist elsewhere. Characteristically hers, with their confronting disposition and nod to the erotic, their pull is the product of a more intimate beast. ‘We have within us at least two sides,’ considers the photographer. ‘I call it what we see and what we feel: some things we keep hidden, although we are comfortable with this vision, it's not thought out. It's instant gratification. We see, we like, we snap and we capture. But what we show, especially the world of beauty, is rarely the real thing.

‘The finished image is thought out, toyed with, stepped on, glossed over and touched up,’ she continues. ‘My Polaroids are not! They are, in fact, the real thing. I refer to these Polaroids as my alter-ego. Freud might say I'm free-associating: I'm being free, knowing that the end results in polish and paint, ie, a beauty image.’ It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Trope’s Polaroids are already the subject of a book, published by Patrick Remy Studio in 2023. Moreover, the new exhibition, Trope’s first in France, is effectively a full circle moment: first encountering Trope’s work in a magazine in 2000, Carole Lambert eventually met the photographer at a book signing. ‘It has been a true and real collaboration,’ Trope shares of working alongside the gallerist. ‘It is a marriage of our taste and instinct combined.’

‘Polaroids by Donna Trope’, Monday-Friday, 2pm-6pm,

Galerie Carole Lambert, 81 Rue du Temple, 75003 Paris, lambert-lambert.com, @galeriecarolelambert