Christopher Walken is an actor known for playing eccentric and sometimes sinister characters. But the director and artist Julian Schnabel once told the Los Angeles Times: ‘He’s like a deer in the headlights’. Here, Schnabel uses a large-format Polaroid camera—one of only seven built in the late 1970s and early 1980s—to photograph his friend and frequent collaborator, exploiting the shallow depth of field to suggest cervine anxiety, or at least reluctant celebrity. The painstaking and expensive process—using a camera weighing over 100 kilograms, mounted on a wheeled base—belies the usually instantaneous production of a Polaroid picture and infuses the ephemeral medium with the consequence of a psychological study. Walken’s stripped-down suit echoes the spareness of the composition. Casual even by contemporary standards—which tend to define formal menswear as a collared shirt rather than suit and tie—it is nonetheless charged with rich colour and luxuriant detail.