People ask me why I shoot with polaroids. Why I occasionaly abandon my "real" photography equipment and pick up an out dated Polaroid Spectra. Well here's how it started:
I've always been intrested with run-down abandond buildings and homes. Especially homes. It's sad to think of the stories that may have lead up to a family having to leave their home. Isn't it the American dream to own your own home and having a family pet? So what could happen to make it end. Or who would end it? I'd find photographs, sometimes entire family albumbs left behind. Glimpses of the memories made inside that house. It always got my brain going, to see these photographs of a home decorated for Christmas, and then look up and see collapsing ceilings, and holes in the walls, broken windows. But there wen't ever any answers on how it got that way. So I had to use the pictures to create a story on how it happend. Maybe it wasn't exactly how everything had gone down, but the relics of a family albumb was all my curriosity had.
Sometimes if the home was old enough the family albumb would be full of 600 series Polaroid shots, or even older larger format film from Polaroid Land cameras. There's something appealing about polaroid film, the colors are always off, aswell as the exposure and white balence. They're unpredictable, and unexpected every time. Sometimes the developer inside the packet wont make it to every corrner, and you wind up with blank spots, or weird markings, or uneven exposures. But every polaroid you take it's the only one, and impossible to ever recreate. No negatives, no nothing, that's it. One of a kind, every time. Every square that comes out of that camrea can be 2 mins old, or 30 years old if you want it to be. So if you think my random Polaroids are random. Think of the stories they might tell. Think of them less as a photograph, and more as someone elses memories. It's why I take them. I look at every shot as if it was a found photogtraph, and wonder where it was taken, and why? Why signifagance could this little framed photo have to anyone? So write your own stories about what they mean, so I invite you to think outside of that thin white border.
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