A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Polaroid SX-70 and Impossible Film

I have two Polaroid SX-70 cameras. These shots are from the Model 2 in white and tan. It's a very pretty camera and is probably the one of these that I will keep. I took it to a softball game in May and here are some results.

Someone, upon seeing these, remarked that they have a very 90's look. Interestingly, a friend about ten years my junior commented that these have a very 80's look. To my eyes, they look like their from the 70's. To a friend who's ten years my senior, they looked like they're from the late 60's.

Polaroids don't hold a specific epoch in their look, feel, and appeal. Polaroids instead remind of something we saw before the advent of digital -- a photo we could take and shake and watch materialize in front of our eyes. Then we could write a note on the border and chemical packet grip and stick a pin through it and hang it on our wall. Polaroids weren't meant to be ultra-refined and pixel-sharp; Polaroids were meant to -- and success at -- capturing a moment's essence. Polaroid images capture the feeling and sense of a moment and in enough detail that we recall it, but not in so much that we are forced to relive it. Polaroids offer us a memory but with the grace of distance and time, and we associate them with something from years ago, from a time we remember as happier, and we associate the photo, new or old, with that sense of youthful happiness, imbuing it into any Polaroid whether we took it today or in some previous, nearly forgotten decade that remains in our minds as little more than whispers and ghosts.


Very retro look. Very hipster.


Lined up waiting to go.


Sunset and trash can.



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