Life After Death: New Polaroids

In 2006, I picked up a Polaroid 250 at an antique store. Soon after, a collapsible SX-70 followed. I was a 17 year old kid with a summer job and some disposable income and the cameras looked cool. Now, in 2017, at age 28, I have a shoebox full of over three hundred Polaroids, with snapshots from over a decade of my life. Relationships that have come and gone, friends I’ve fallen out of touch with, places I used to live, they’re all in that shoebox, little square images with a pouch at the bottom (this is what’s called ‘integral film’, and it makes up about half of my total shots, the rest in the older ‘packfilm’ format).

It’s not an exaggeration to say that one of the most important threads in my life over these 11 years has been instant photography.

In 2008, Polaroid announced they’d no longer manufacture film. I stocked up on as much type-600 as I could, but I didn’t have much hope I’d ever be able to shoot integral film after my stocks ran out. Within a few years, a company had managed to reverse-engineer the process Polaroid used to make the film after buying their last factory. The first images from their new film were hazy, temperamental, and just disappointing overall. The film cost $25 for 8 shots too, a far cry from the $12-for-10-shots the last Polaroid film sold for.

But, I kept shooting. It was too important to give up on, almost instinctual to use.

I can’t tell if the film kept improving or I learned how to manage its quirks, but the shots I would take with my SX-70 got better and better. And thanks to the recent resurgence in instant film’s popularity, economies of scale have lowered the price.

Here are a collection of images taken in this new era of instant film, shooting Polaroids after Polaroid ceased to be, and then was again. A celebration of rebirth.