I was raised in the black and white Modernist tradition. After years of training to perfect the style, I found myself needing new avenues of exploration in order to keep my photography practice engaging, to push my comfort zone, and to mentally challenge the way in which I was contributing to the medium. I tend to lean hard into life changes and nothing felt more antithetical than the Polaroid image. Around this time, the Polaroid company went bankrupt in light of the thriving digital era, high margins, and mounting debt. The newfound Impossible Project would keep the cult following alive as former Polaroid employees made new films for vintage cameras. Extremists like myself would buy expired, original Polaroid film in online auctions and load it into the high powered battery cartridges of the Impossible Project. The results yielded unpredictable color shifts, unique grain, increased fog, and embracing the near failures of the drying chemicals therein. Combine this with the physical separation and bleaching of the results? Where my process was once methodically predictable as I sought perfection, my process is now full of happy serendipity and unique results. A landscape once perpetuated as perfection now celebrates degradation as equally beautiful.
