Recently I pulled out a good chunk of my collection of Polaroid prints. There's a photo book meet up I attend once a month, but I hadn't bought any new books recently, so I decided to take some of this work to share. It was a pleasant surprise to see how well received the small images were. In fact, the enthusiasm was enough to gain some offered help at editing and perhaps having a collection to show (in some way...this is all very preliminary). I've rekindled my delight in instant film (now, only Instax is available in my price range, and I may need to get a different camera model that offers a tad more control) after reviewing all this work, prints in hand (which is quite different than looking at the scanned and posted work as it is on Flickr ).
Going through my wooden boxes and drawers that contain all these prints has been a task I've been meaning to address for a while. It's nice to be finally getting at it. It's super nice to still feel so much joy in the work. It's a genre that continues to resonate. There's an embarrassingly large number of self portraits in this collection. I say embarrassingly...there's really nothing to be embarrassed about (an issue to work with, perhaps??). But many of these are interesting and well done (or at least I feel that way...from the most objective position I can take). I'm trying to figure out how to present a selection (not just the self portraits, all of them) and what makes sense in that presentation. It's going to deal with a lot of things...but so far the philosophical rhyme and reason is nebulous in my mind.
Regarding most of the peel apart prints, they are on Fuji film (now, sadly, completely discontinued). But there are a small number on Polaroid film (if you were to ask me which one, I couldn't tell you). One small pack of prints have aged to a sweet, purpley/brownish gray. I've done my best to scan them as close to the prints in real life appearance, but my scanner glass needs cleaning (on the inside...which I'm totally intimidated to do) so you'll notice some weird mottling in the darker portions of the images. I've also made the decision to not edit out the specks and leave the prints on the raw side.
These are from several years ago...perhaps 2011?
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