Near-field contact exposures through a chromeless phase-shifting mask,at 193 nm are used to create arbitrarily shaped structures as small as 45 nm on thin (similar to10-15 mum). sheets of polyimide. The thin sheets. make smooth, stable laminates on carrier wafers through van der Waals interactions for processing like normal,silicon wafers and can be removed to enable conformal mask contact during exposure. Further,the thin substrates are flexible enough to allow for curved and/or shaped photonic surfaces. When a silicon-containing bilayer resist is used, high aspect ratio (>4:1) structures 50-80 nm in width are obtained following oxygen-plasma pattern transfer. Optical simulations using the finite-difference time-domain model are used to predict the near-field intensity distribution,. and its results are compared to the experiments. This model indicates that with unpolarized light and a contact gap less than or equal to25 nm, exposure latitudes in excess of 15% are possible for printing isolated, arbitrarily shaped features 50-60 nm Wide over areas limited in size only by the mask dimensions (>10 cm square). (C) 2003 American Vacuum Society.