Jess LeClair Photography Blog

I keep changing my mind about how I’m going to keep track of this whole Photo-A-Day project! I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with posting my images to flickr, but less about the blog! So I think that what I am going to start doing is posting my favorite photo of the week here! All the rest will still be available over at my flickr site!

Okay, so my favorite from this week has to be Day 52:

Recently I pulled out one of my old Polaroid cameras and have been playing with the double exposure feature! Not all Polaroid cameras have this feature and in fact most don’t! But Minolta made a camera in 1990 called the Minolta Instant Pro that used Polaroid Spectra film. It’s become highly sought after by artists now because of the degree of control it allows the user to have over the image. The best thing about mine? I got it for free! I found it at the dump in my hometown and picked it up on a whim. In its day it sold for more than $200!

You may have heard that on February 8th of this year, Polaroid announced its plan to cease production on all instant films. I found the news deeply saddening. And I started thinking about what Polaroid film has meant to me. Seems a strange to think of film as meaningful, but Polaroid has always been a part of my life. Gigi (my father’s mother) has had a Polaroid camera since I can remember - quite literally since I was born.

Every time the family got together, out came the Polaroid. By the end of the visit, there was always a stack of photos on the kitchen counter documenting the entire visit. If we came late to a family event, we always knew that we could find the stack and catch up on anything we may have missed. And always at the end of the visit, we’d gather for a group photo which was always taken at least twice. That way we could take a copy home with us right then.

One year, Gigi got a new Polaroid camera and gave the old one to my brother. I think I used it as often as he did! Each box of film was a treasure. She sometimes gave them to us for Christmas or our birthdays and we knew that we had to make them last. They were so expensive! $10 for 10 pictures seemed like it may as well have been a million dollars. But it was SO HARD not to just rip through the film as soon as we got it.

Polaroid was to me what digital cameras are to kids today. A way to instantly re-live and review events as they are happening. I taught an after-school art program recently and as a treat one afternoon, brought my polaroid cameras with some old film for the students to work with. I was so excited to share this opportunity to use the film (which is still fairly expensive) with them. And they just looked at me so blankly. I realized it was meaningless to them. Instant film? Why bother? We have digital cameras! Of course, as soon as they played with them a little, the magic of the thing was obvious. And by the end of the afternoon, they all wanted to know where they could rush out and buy one for their very own!

When I graduated from college in 2000, Gigi gave me a small photo album with a silver cover engraved with my name. In it were photos she’d taken of me - mostly polaroids. My entire life so far. It was such a treat - such an amazing gift to have these images. In a moment of extreme generosity (or weakness, I’m not sure which), I’ve decided to share some of them with you. The first ones are posted above, labeled with Gigi’s awesome calligraphy (I can’t even call it handwriting, though it is how she writes all the time!). I have many more, but these are some of my favorites and show the spread of years quite nicely.

Keep in mind some of these images are more soul baring than others, so be nice!! Not all of us had the good sense not to go with fashion trends as they were happening…

One last note and then I’ll stop. There is a wonderful website out there called Save Polaroid. These lovely folks are doing their best to convince another company to take up where Polaroid is leaving off and start producing instant film again. They have a great “action pack” with things you can to to help their cause. If you have a second, check them out and see what you can do to help!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under Personal Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.