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.
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.
Found this family while working on another project, photographing an immigration policy reform rally in Greeley, Colo., last weekend. Pictured here is Nicole Harrison, her niece Cadence Jurgens, and her two sons, Logan and Lain. The family had come out of the house that they are remodeling to watch the march pass.
Driving along the fence separating Mexico from the US, my radio dial finds only Rush Limbaugh and narcocorridos. It’s fitting, the polemic of the borderland airwaves, those two forces of equal and opposing weight pressing against each other along that thin, straight line that slices the belly of the Sonoran desert. Here, in this no mans’ land, the mountains of neighboring countries stare back at each other across a wide, expansive flat. It is a meeting place of sorts. The point at which the Rocky Mountains end and the Sierra Madre begin. It’s here where four ecosystems converge in a quiet sort of chaos, their boundaries controlled by the subtle forces of climate and topography. It is also the site of the newest section of wall dividing Mexico from the US, lengths of steel mesh and iron driven into the ground like tent stakes along a laser-straight line. Mexico to the south, the U.S. to the north.
Alan Blixt, a volunteer guide on the nearby Coronado National Memorial, points out a red flower for which my notes do not recall a name. The plant blooms in the early spring, well before other flowers, making its own sneaky effort to beat Darwin at his game. Early blossoms avoid competition for pollination, explains Blixt. ”All species are trying to expand their range,” he continues as he tells me about nature’s slow war being waged on the desert floor where each ecosystem fights for control of limited space.
The flower serves as a peculiar metaphor, one of the many grays buffering the firm, black line of the border fence. There is grey to the south, those border towns built around entire industries catering to the needs of their northern couterparts. And there is also grey to the north, places where language and culture have more foundation in Mexico than in the anglicized dreams of protectionists and xenophobes. It seems to me that the fence itself serves a very limited purpose of realizing, in visual terms, a line which was formerly best known to cartographers, a way to impose black-and-white order over something much less clear.
Indeed, there is no shortage of signs pointing to the fact that immigration through Arizona’s desert continues in spite of the fence. Empty water bottles collect in eddies, blown up against the fence by the broad current of the wind whipping the arid landscape. There is plenty of additional evidence also: discarded backpacks, discarded clothing, discarded cell phones, shoe tracks, foot paths, holes cut through the fence, holes dug under the fence, and ladders.
Yes, ladders.
Nothing feeds the absurdity of an 18 foot-high, 49 billion dollar fence, like a 20 foot ladder. In a sense, it is Roadrunner beating Wile E. Coyote’s latest invention with nothing but guile, that moment when our feathered hero steps out of the way as the cartoon canine drives his latest, greatest ACME bird-killer off the cliff, hanging for a moment in the air before plummeting into a small explosion of dust far below.
I am not saying this to belittle the broader notion of rule-of-law, rather to point out that the fence serves a certain fallacy which I am finding as I continue working stories related to immigration. The fence puts the cart before the horse and sends a message that is not exactly true; it imposes a bright line by which we are supposed to be able to mechanically identify those who offend the integrity of our borders in that West Side Story-esque kind of way. If you’re on the wrong side of the tracks, we’re all supposed to know it.
The problem is that the issue has never been that clear. The south 40 of the immigration backlog is filled with thousands of Blixt’s little, red flowers, immigrants whose cases defy our conventional wisdom about what makes an immigrant documented or undocumented. It is quite possible for a person to enter lawfully but, for the purposes of the law, be undocumented; Conversely, it is also possible for for someone to enter unlawfully and still be eligible for some form of legal status.
I know this is not quite the conclusion that folks who see the border as a black-and-white line with black-and-white consequences care to hear, though it is the subject of much of my upcoming project work, looking at the shades of grey in immigration and the havoc our mechanical outlook on the subject has wreaked. Stay tuned to the blog over the next few months for new work on the subject.
For the time being, you’ll have to settle for black-and-white Polaroids of our very grey border.
