oh Polaroid ... don't leave me ...

How do I turn back the clock 20 years so I can spend a good long career as a photographer shooting film and - more specifically - Polaroid?


(click to make 'uge)
Model: Leslie Wilcox w/ Basic NYC
Camera nerd info: Speed Graphic 4x5 w/ Kodak Aero Ektar 7" 2.5 @ f/5.6, ~1/2s shutter

I made the photo above last week, exhausting the last of my Polacolor Tungston. And as stocks of polaroid in the world - all expired - slowly wilt and go the way of the polar bear, I come to realize just how invaluable they really are.

The combination of the tones and texture of the grain and the paper are so unique, with a subtle linearity the grain takes as it follows the fiber of the print.

Even this little one from the back of the hassy captures my heart:



So I've found my aesthetic just in time to let it go. In some ways, shooting polaroids like this amounts to good training for post processing. Digital has become the modus operandi of convenience even for the biggest studios. Alex - the assistant I hired in Paris - had a great anecdote about Demarchelier. They were on location entrenched in mountain snow with light so good, Alex said you could literally taste its tartness and smell its crispness. "And here's this guy," he said, "shooting fucking digital".

Though the old techniques are coming back using new technology, replacing high-gloss images that are so crisp it's deafening (every pore snaps to the beat of "when you're a jet ..") and you can't hear yourself think.

But it's changing.
The thrill is gone.
Tones are more important than edges.

As a sign of this, the other day my site had a hit from Steven Meisel's studio. Someone had searched "Lilian Bassman Darkroom" and found my post on some of her work. Maybe we'll see a bit of the Bassman aesthetic crop up in a future Meisel shoot. I'm interested to see that, as I love the bleaching techniques she uses - and the way brush strokes (or cottonball strokes) come out of the shadows. Knowing Meisel's team is amazing, I want to see what they're capable of.

Even now as I look through Bassman's work, I see it informing the image above - little subtleties that caught my eye - the nape of a neck, or how the hands become so gentle, or the lines of a nose ...



Oh yeah - one important thing about that polaroid above... the best shot of the day: when I pulled the 'roid, this is how it came out:



The film is 4 years out of date and doesn't work as it's supposed to sometimes. But it was such an amazing half an image, that I went back the the digital files, pulled one, shopped it and shopped it and shopped it some more - and completed the file.

So it's not an either/or - it's always a dance between the newest technology and the timeless techniques that inform the final aesthetic.