5.15.2011
Fairwell My Friend
The Polaroid Series
In the fall of 2007 while rummaging through a discount bin at a drug store on Corydon my friend kain from victoria found some expired polaroid film. It didn't sync with his camera so i bought it instead. i got 5 packages of 30 and two packages of 10 each priced at 1 dollar. i remember leaving three packs 10 packs behind and regretted it for ever. So for $7 +tax i got 170 pictures but no camera to match the 600 film. i ended up opening one of the packages of film that winter before finding a camera and cut out old photos to glue onto the window of the undeveloped film. they were old pictures from victoria. i mailed them to a friend back there.
In April of 2008 i was in Saskatoon by myself on business and decided to wander around the town. i think it's one of Canada's forgotten cities, it's beautiful there. i walked into a tiny camera repair shop and there she was. like my wand choosing me. a small dusty polaroid camera waiting for me.
when i got home i rushed to my room and tried out it out. i was so excited by not knowing if the film was still good or if the little asian man from Toon town was ripping me off. IT WORKED! the very first photo i took was the first photo in this series project. i took my first photo and put it into the second photo. when it came to the third i almost put the first one in again but thought no, i'll put the second one in instead. i was so excited i immediately shot my whole first cartridge. very little thought was put into the starting of this project, it just kind of happened.
Over the following 3 years i lugged my camera around my neck. this project and i have been though so much together. there is a story, a memory, for all 204 pictures. taking photos of friends and the support they showed for the project helped me keep going through the tough times. over the three years i had two of my cameras stolen and broken, one of them one of them thrown against the walll. i went through a couple months without shooting when i felt i had no friends. there was a time when i said "this project is the only good thing going for me in my life." someone said "that's so sad". The day i got my typewriter i started typing captions/puns/rhymes/inside jokes on the white space underneath, mostly puns to do with the person's name or what is going on in the picture. there are countless reference pictures in the series that were shot because of other older pictures myself or other friends had taken. at the end of the summer of 2010 after realizing i would never reach my goal of 200 pictures due to the stealing and smashing of my camera i had one picture left and realized it was all over. Then as an unexpected gift (possibly the most meaningful, selfless, important gift i've ever received) i was granted 10 more photos to finish my project from someone special i barely knew.
The series is made up of 204 photos, over 200 hundred friends, spanning 8 cities, over the past 3 years of my life and now it's over. it's over. it's over. it's over. it's hard to think that something so important to me is finished. my initial reaction was being on the brink of tears. it's all very overwhelming. but then i force myself to look back onto it all and smile. the reason i feel this way now is because it was so amazing while it lasted. like a said in a post not too long ago thinking about stuff like this.
"every so often amazing things come your way. you do that for a while then you do something else then you do something else and so on. that is life." -Ian Johnson
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Yeah man. That Polaroid project was pretty sick. Nothing’s over, you’ll just a new thing to carry on for a while.
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