Polaroid Abstracts

Project description

EXHIBITION

SX-70, 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco, CA 2015

The Polaroid SX-70 camera was introduced in 1972 the year I was 12 years old.  After my grandfather sold his company and retired then opened a camera store.  He sold everything from expensive Mamiyas and Hasselblads to Kodak Instamatics.  He’d bring home some fantastic piece of equipment and he’d show me how it all worked.  There was a camera like none I had ever seen…it was the SX-70 Polaroid.  It was this strange flat box that popped open and expanded to three times its height.  It shouldn’t be a camera.  The photos shot out of it and from smoke and liquid an image formed. 

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties after graduate school that I rediscovered this alchemical box.  I began collecting them when I’d find them in thrift stores because flat they looked like a miniature Donald Judd sculpture…aluminum and leather.    Some worked, some didn’t.  Then I discovered the film was still being made…Time-Zero Film.  I love this camera more than any I have ever owned.  It was square format; it had a beautiful squeal when it shot out the film.  It’s mirrors clacked when I shot a photo.  It was simple; I could adjust the aperture from the white side to the black side.  I could focus and defocus it (unlike the later 600 cameras).

I carried my SX-70 everywhere…through California the Sierras to the South West deserts to upstate New York and to Iceland.   Composing in square format made me aware of the rectangularity that is prime to everything.   It allowed me to create images that turned the known into the abstract because it’s all smoke, liquid and mirrors.  The colors were a rich range from deep browns to royal reds and vibrant ecclesiastic purples to faded creamy canary yellows. The camera’s ontological gearbox creating being out of nothingness.

Then it stopped.  The last pack of Time-Zero film was produced in 2006.  I put my cameras away.   I had shot hundreds of images and wanted to shoot hundreds more.  I’d take out my cameras and put in an empty film pack, push the red button and listen to that high-pitched swirl of sound.  But the alchemical transubstantiation was lost.   All that streaked blended color that resonated with my desire for nothingness was gone.  The images here are the last of the Time-Zero Polaroids.  No longer will there be an image like the ones created by this camera.  All those colors have left us.