The main aims behind this process were:
- To become familiar with the limitations of the polaroid process and see them as an opportunity to simply ways of looking at and being in the city environment.
- To explore my very local (a circumference of maybe 3/4 city blocks) area and look for visual narratives in the everyday, playing with light and composition.
- Things got most interesting when I focussed on double explosure composing and even camera shake at specific points – ie. just after exposing the paper.
My reflections back are that the process of executing the method should be analogue but that the method itself does not need to be photography.
It needs to be outside in situ so that you are responding to that environment (nature, light, the cityscape, landscape, skyscape) or any of these in isolation but just not to internal influences.
These pictures were all taken through July/August 22.
Lots of insitu findings. That the composition has to be simple to be engaging. That beidges – as much as I love them – are not the best subjects – I think that is to do with horizontal structure on top of horiozontal structure. Polaroid cameras have no zoom so trying to focus in doesn’t work. Trying to make complicated stories doesn’t work, and the light has to be good but not over bright as your image surface will only over expose.
Another thing is that in scanning these in the light of the scanner flooded some of them, causing incidental but interesting further exposures I guess you could call them.
