Inside Analog Photo, a radio program that focuses on traditional photographic processes, recently featured my Polaroid work for one of their segments. The feature included an interview about the project and the process. The segment can be downloaded from iTunes, here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=291806626
To me, it’s strange how hotels flavor travel. They’re like department stores in the sense that they want you to feel at home when you’re not. Everything is familiar, everything is, by design, exactly the same as the last chain you stayed in. The corner table, the phone on the nightstand, the hotel hangers that you can’t steal, fresh towels, continental breakfast and the deep red and brown wallpapers, the black-out blind and the sheer curtain that rests right under it –they are the same in every other hotel in the country. We’re creatures of comfort and, I guess, the biggest irony of travel is that we seek out things that are familiar when we’re somewhere unfamiliar. It’s a kind of travel that has its place and, at least in the last few weeks, the kind of travel I’ve tried to avoid.
In the last month I’ve lived out of a rental car, slept in the bed of my pickup, seen what morning looks like in the parking lot of K Mart, Wal Mart, truck stops, rest stops, and skipped around security to sleep in a livestock stall at the Wyoming State Fair. Stall #6, in the old building near the red barn, to be precise. Guess it’s been an immersion of sorts, the way a place can just wash over you, the way you notice subtle changes, the quality of light, ambient sounds, the way the air feels on your face in the morning. It’s approaching place as though it were a poem to be lived and not prose to be memorized and, for me anyhow, it puts my mind in the right frame to see the quiet, little things that are common to the greater tenor of our Americana.
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Been so busy with other work lately that I’ve found myself with quite a backlog of material to share from recent weeks. The easiest pieces to check off are the bits that have been published, including this shoot of a young Colorado girl who is one of tens of thousands of immigrant-children who stand to be positively impacted by the passage of the federal DREAM Act this fall. The Act comes before both chambers of Congress and essentially affords children of ‘good moral character’ who have been in the United States for more than five years and who have graduated from an American high school a path towards permanent residency. Their residency hinges on completion of either college education or military service.
For immigrants with the academic credentials to attend college, the DREAM Act affords them the opportunity for in-state tuition as well as federal student loans (two things currently unavailable under federal law). The biggest tragedy of the status quo is that an estimated 65,000 immigrant-students graduate high school each year and are unable to attend college. In a twist of unintended consequences, these intelligent, assimilated young men and women remain in the United States as part of a hidden underclass of English-speaking, Americanized, undocumented immigrants.
The thing that is particularly challenging about the Act is how contentious this issue is. Of all proposed immigration legislation, this is a no-brainer. As opponents to immigration reform are keen to remind us, many undocumented immigrants have made the journey to the United States of their own volition, knowingly broaching the laws of the United States in doing so; their children, however, have not. The Act, in its essence, gives a no-fault waiver to children who had no say in how they entered the United States and offers society the ability to harness the talent and enthusiasm that would otherwise go wasted.
The Act was also part of the focus of Luceo’s recent group project, Still Hoping, available here: www.stillhoping.com
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This project started by accident when friend and fellow photographer Michael Rubenstein loaned me a Polaroid back for a Holga camera in 2007. Ten frames later I was sold. The Polaroid brings two photographic methods that are seemingly at odds with each other together into one format. You get the immediacy of digital with the tangible, ’share-ability’ of film. A few days after borrowing Rubenstein’s back, I returned to Colorado and bought my first ten dollar Land Camera, a relatively obsolete Polaroid with limited control and a cost-prohibitive cap on how much film I could actually shoot. Now priced at over a dollar a frame, the format forces a judicious approach to making frames, something that the bottomless 32 gig digital cards seem to undermine. Listen to the clicks on the tape of any news conference and you will, no doubt, hear photographers pushing the limits of 24 frames-per-second, a method of shooting so rapid and oblivious as to make the process closer to shooting a movie than a still frame.
Since 2007, the camera has gone with me almost everywhere I’ve been, from my next door neighbor’s living room after his open-heart surgery to Obama’s inauguration. Until earlier this year, I’d been looking at all these different events as isolated series of images; recently, it’s become obvious that there is a bigger tale of Americana at hand in the thread that winds through all of the photographs. NPR’s Claire O’Neill recently helped me put together an edit of this work-in-progress that gets at this. I’m very happy with her final edit and even happier that she’s taken the time to share it on NPR’s blog, The Picture Show. Please have a look for yourself and feel free to revisit my website in the coming weeks. I’m working on a comprehensive edit of this work that will bring all the Polaroid galleries into one, bigger grouping of pictures.
Did a portrait series of the Luceo folks on the last night of our meeting. More Polaroids with a little experimental twist tossed in. Photographing photographers is a little stressful –ok, a lot stressful. Took a few quiet minutes with Kevin German to play around with some test frames and get my head on straight before calling everyone out, one at a time. After 50 frames, a pep talk from German, and a couple hours, I felt like I came away with something I could be proud of.
Kendrick did a fun series of Polaroid 600s in 2007 and just posted it to her blog, here. There’s still something incredibly appealing about these old analogues. With any luck, Fuji will keep this stuff in production for the foreseeable future. I’m not really ready to stop shooting it just yet.
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Dan Celvi just passed this note to me re. Polaroid’s future. Apparently it’s old news to everyone except me. Still, more than glad to see this:
“I dunno if you saw this article or not, but in case you didn’t, I figured I’d send you the link. Basically, some guy somehow managed to spur a few million from random investors to help them keep the Polaroid line alive for no other reason to keep it going.
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I’m heading to Wyoming in a few minutes to continue with some work that I started last month. Looking forward to being able to share a finished product, but the mighty god of publication embargos will prevent that until the project runs.
Went to my third machine gun shoot last weekend, adding chapters to an ongoing look at the role of the gun as part of the bigger American archetype. Kinda’ fun to go to these things now after becoming more familiar with the people, the guns, the sound, and the concussion that goes along with them. Every time I sit down to write one of these gun posts, I find myself wanting to point backwards to my initial sentiments that I shared after attending my first shoot. The write-up is available here. The only pieces of that story to have changed are that my friend, mentioned in the beginning of the text, who struck an IED in Afghanistan, has since been awarded a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star; Lester, the happy farmer with the bowling ball cannon, finally made the photo edit and is pictured below with his son, Daniel; And the event’s organizer, Bob McBride, was kind enough to loan me a pair of gloves for the latest shoot. The hole in the index finger was, according to McBride, for boogers. Turns out it worked just as well to adjust camera controls.
These are a few of the Polaroids I took away from the last shoot. Only had a few hours on account of some other work I had to return to Denver for. Color photos to follow sometime in the next week.
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