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.