Polaroid Magic

Looking through my old photos, I am reminded of how much I love Polaroids. As the NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, "Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one's eyes, right before one's eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film... Glossy talismans in unreal colors, as ephemeral as breath on glass, they wreaked all the more havoc with our emotions for being so unassuming and commonplace."

These ordinary pictures are snatches of Lily's childhood preserved on unassuming small rectangles of film, but they are worth more to me than all the treasures in the world.

Polaroid Pos/Neg

                                                                                                 Alan Bennett
                                                                                           Miranda Brooks
                                                                                                 Susan Minot
                                                                                                  Vince Gallo
                                                                                                   Julie Delpy
                                                                                           George Skelcher

Back in 1994, when I was an aspiring but strictly amateur photographer, I discovered Polaroid's wonderful pos/neg film. It gives you the usual instant polaroid with a negative that can be fixed in a sodium sulfite solution. It was the best of both worlds. I used it mostly to take portraits of friends. These are some of my favorites, most of which were taken in my tiny studio apartment on Mulberry Street. I wish I had photographed everyone I knew then with this film, which sadly does not exist anymore.