Polaroid photography and other film adventures - Why Am I Making This, Issue #2
Dear friends,
Hello from the sunny shores of my favorite Maine lake! I have been doing my very best to spend as much time as possible at the lake recently, where I currently sit writing this letter to you on my phone. The lake, to me, is a place of pleasant boredom surrounded by nature, and for that reason it’s one of the few places that feels normal during this time of extended quarantine. There’s not much I can do in the world now, period, but there’s never much to do here, anyway.
If you’ve opened this email, it’s because you are subscribed to Why Am I Making This?, a newsletter from the Maine-based artist Julien Coyne, where, about once a month, I tell you what I’ve been up to (recently it’s mostly been Polaroid photography) and maybe have a public existential crisis about whether what I’ve been up to is meaningful in some way. If that doesn’t sound like something you’re interested in getting, you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of this email. If you weren't hoping for a 2000-word essay about Polaroids, you can also just skip to the bottom to get a quick update on my continuing ceramics adventures.
If you are interested, it means the world to me. Let’s get started.
My triumphant return to Polaroid photography
I never had a Polaroid camera growing up (I think I was a little bit too young for them), but I have had a quiet fascination with them for a long time. I still have the Polaroid taken of my childhood best friend and I at McDonalds (I think??) with Cookie Monster (???). A high school friend of mine had a vintage Polaroid camera, and I remember his struggles with the temperamental early Impossible Project film, in the days when Polaroid had stopped making film.
I looked on with some interest in those days, but I didn’t get a Polaroid camera myself until two years ago, when it was much less of a struggle to get film that worked well. I could also just buy a new camera (a Polaroid Originals OneStep 2) instead of looking for a reliably refurbished one.
I took photos with the OneStep 2 slowly but consistently through the second half of 2018, and then for no obvious reason, I just stopped using it. I don’t think I took a single photo with it in 2019. If you read my last newsletter, or have known me well for a year or two, this will come as no surprise to you.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to take it out again, and I took some photos that came out washed out and delightful (the film had been sitting in my camera for a while, and was probably expired by the time I put it in there anyway). These were the ones:
That Polaroid magic. The failure to focus, the unpredictable colors and contrast - so different than the true-to-life default of a phone camera!
There was, in fact, a reason I took out my Polaroid again. The reason is this newsletter. I liked editing and framing my phone photos for this newsletter last time, and my idle mind started thinking that Polaroids would look good filling the space between paragraphs... and like that, I ordered armfuls of film and used four packs in a week. You see some of my favorites from June and July scattered through this letter, just as I had imagined.
You might wonder, why do I need a reason like this newsletter to get myself to take Polaroid photos? I have a few thoughts about that. Photography, even more than most of my other creative interests, is always the subject of an internal “why am I doing this?” If I go somewhere beautiful or see something interesting, I always want to take a picture. Why? So I can remember the moment I saw it? As a reference for a drawing or painting? To show other people? Specifically, to impress other people with my artful composition and presentation of the photo? Or to impress them with what interesting and beautiful places I’ve been?
After I’ve taken the photo, are my actions with respect to it living up to my reason for taking it? Do I actually use it for reference, or to bring back fond memories? Do I actually share it with anyone in a meaningful way? Do I bother presenting it anywhere, as one piece in the gallery of Art I Have Made And Liked?
These questions are difficult enough with digital photos, which are free and effortless to take. If I don't use them for anything, as is usually the case, then that's fine. I might find a better use for some other ones I'll take later. It didn't cost me anything to take these ones, specifically.
Film is trickier. Film is not cheap, and the price-per-shot of instant film can be especially sobering. So why bother? Is it just for the aesthetic? And if so, is it so I can share them as a body of work? Why didn’t I just take the photo digitally?
I started a blog just about a month after getting my OneStep 2, and I don’t think it was unrelated. If I was going to be buying film and taking artsy photos around where I lived, I wanted to actually be doing something with those photos instead of letting them languish in a box. And a blog could fill a gap I had noticed when I was thinking of buying the OneStep 2 - I had wished for articles with plentiful photos and thoughts about the film, the process, the outcomes. Maybe I could post things like that on my blog, and over time it would become a collection of photography I had done over the years!
I mostly didn’t do that. (The blog has sat unattended for a year and a half now, although I have been thinking about reinvigorating it... I had written it off as abandoned, but as I start to see my creative life as something that develops over years, not months, I have realized that a year-and-a-half gap in posts isn’t really that damning for a project.) My uncertainty about what to do with my Polaroids is probably the reason I stopped taking them for a while.
There are a few reasons people come back to when they talk about why people bother shooting film in the age of digital and smartphone photography. There’s the aesthetic, of course - which is possible, though not always easy - to replicate in post for a digital photo. There’s an argument to be made for quality - excellent film setups can be had for the fraction of the cost of an equivalent digital one - but that’s unrelated to instant photos. There’s the psychological factor of having a limited number of shots available - when each photo you take is one of 8, 10, 24, or 36 images you have available in a pack or roll of film, you think a little harder about what to spend those precious frames on. And of course, there’s the wish in the hearts of many to - in this digital world - be making something fundamentally unrelated to the world of screens. Holding a Polaroid photo in your hand, or picking up a page of negatives from a photo shop just makes you feel that the photos you’ve taken are of this world, real and tangible.
I feel all of these reasons. But there’s something even more in there somewhere, some further reason that I keep returning to film photography. It’s related to the point about limited frames focusing your attention. But when people bring that up, I have felt that they explicitly or implicitly suggest that the limited frames improve your photography, and that slowing down may result in better photos, and that this is a reason to use film. I don't think that's wrong, but I'm thinking about another reason, too.
I rarely tend to shoot a roll of film all at once, so when I get old rolls developed after a few months (or a few years), I’m usually surprised and delighted to find a slideshow of moments spanning months - two here from swimming in the river in the summer, five there from visiting friends in the fall. The times I took them come rushing back to me. I experience something similar when I scroll back through the camera roll on my phone, but the memories are usually less visceral, less surprising. And I think it has to do with the sheer number of images on my phone. Tens of thousands of them. Each photo, each moment, is less meaningful for there being so many of them. But when, on a roll of film, there’s just a few, each window into the past feels precious, exalted. I think it might also have to do with never having seen the photos before. All I had was my foggy memory, and then seeing the photos for the first time focuses them, brings them back into the light.
I felt something similar looking back through the Polaroids I took in 2018 as my interest rekindled recently. I hadn’t thought about those images for months, and would have been hard pressed to tell you what they were of if you had asked me weeks prior. But when I looked at each one, I remembered the moment I took it in detail - my feelings watching the image develop, what I thought about as I considered my surroundings looking for a subject, my feelings about life generally in the time I took them. The quality of memory surrounding each image is so strong, and I think has to do with how few there are total, as well as the physicality of the photo, of watching it develop.
I think it's worth considering that sometimes (maybe even most of the time) photography is just for myself. A way for me to hold my own memories rather than something that is meaningful to the wider world. Except, I suppose, insofar as I can use the photos to convey those memories and the feelings they evoke in me to others.
That probably deserves a whole other essay sometime.
A new-to-me Polaroid camera
After using a few packs of film in my OneStep 2 and writing the flowery essay about them above, I was really feeling energetic about Polaroids. I wanted to think about focusing on Polaroids of people, which I hadn't done much of. But when I tried a bit with the OneStep 2, they sometimes came out like this:
That's right, camera, I wanted to focus on the bush behind the person, not their face right in the middle of the frame.
I was also frustrated with how I couldn't get up close to my subjects, be they flowers or people. When I would idly browse Polaroid photos on instagram, some of the nicest ones were taken with a camera called the SX-70, which I knew next to nothing about. I thought it was time to do some research. Here's a few of the many, many videos I watched that featured it:
- Retro Tech - Polaroid
- A day out in the woods with the SX-70 - Matt Day
- Matt Day's tips and tricks for the SX-70
- Another day out with the SX-70 - Karin Majoka
Several hours of videos and reading every article I could find online about the SX-70 convinced me I needed one. I ordered one from Brooklyn Film Camera, and it was just as beautiful as I had hoped when it arrived. (Now that I have two Polaroid cameras, I can take photos of them with each other...)
I thought I'd share photos from my first two packs with some lessons I learned.
- Underexpose the image, every time.
I have heard that old SX-70 film was rated at ISO 100, and the current generation is ISO 160, making it a bit more sensitive to light. This means that if the camera is set to expose the image normally, it will come out overexposed, like the image above (my first ever photo with this new camera!) It's also possible the camera just tends to overexpose, period.
- But don't underexpose all the way if your subjects are in shadow.
I had been having luck setting the exposure compensation dial to underexpose the photo as much as possible. (There are three notches on the dial, and I'm still unclear whether each notch is a third of a stop or a full stop.) So when I took the photos above, I cheerfully set the camera to underexpose fully. That is not always a good idea.
- Don't set the photo to overexpose either, though.
After seeing the previous two photos start to develop and realizing the people in them would just be silhouettes, I took another one and overexposed the picture. That was also a bad idea.
- Seriously, I don't think overexposing is ever a good idea.
This photo was taken while I was standing in bright sunlight, but this maple syrup stand was in the shade of some trees. I thought maybe the light meter would be reading the direct sunlight and would underexpose the shadows, which was pretty much everything I was taking a photo of, so I overexposed by one notch... bad idea.
- When you get it right, it's so good.
It takes some trial and error to get a sense of how the light meter works. But once I got the hang of it, I took some of my favorite Polaroids I have taken, ever.
I’m excited to keep using both my Polaroid cameras this summer. Hopefully they'll help make a difficult summer feel a little more breezy. I think I might be ready to break out some of my 35mm film again soon, too...
Closing thoughts
If you read the first installment of this newsletter, you might have been expecting to see a few more finished ceramics! I can show you one new one pre-glaze-firing:
I had expected to be able to show you lots of new glazed pieces, but it took them about a month at the community studio to make it into the kiln for their glaze firing. That's just how it goes sometimes! I just got all of them back yesterday, and I'll have lots to say about them in the next issue.
Until then, take care, and as always, I would love for you to reply with any thoughts you have!