Drawn from more than twenty years of Miles Aldridge’s archive, Please Please Return Polaroid brings together new and earlier instant photographs while extending the inquiry begun in his 2016 book Please Return Polaroid. The subject is not simply a discontinued or diminished photographic technology. Aldridge treats the Polaroid as a working object: provisional, vulnerable to alteration and inseparable from the decisions that precede a finished image.

These photographs function as sketches within his practice. Aldridge scratches and tears their surfaces, joins them with tape, draws over them and constructs compositions through manual cutting and pasting. Such interventions preserve the evidence of thought and revision usually concealed by his meticulously controlled finished photographs. Here, rough edges, damage and adhesive marks are not defects to be corrected but active components of the image.

The book’s apparently irregular sequence follows associative rather than chronological logic. Images from different moments meet through unexpected visual and psychological correspondences, allowing colour, gesture and surface to carry the argument from page to page. Some Polaroids are enlarged across double-page spreads, making their abrasions and reworked material structure unusually prominent. The shift in scale turns the intimate instant print into a field in which handling, accident and intention become equally legible.

Published by Steidl as a 208-page hardcover, the volume offers collectors a concentrated view of the analogue procedures underlying Aldridge’s better-known visual precision. Its importance lies in this access to process: it records how an artist associated with immaculate construction uses a modest, unstable medium to test ideas and permit imperfection. The dreamlike sequencing and emphasis on the photograph as a handled object also make the book relevant beyond a single body of work, placing it within the broader history of photographic editing, maquettes and material experimentation.