Portrait of a Polaroid: The Blues

Recently I’ve been revisiting some of my work and writing about my favorite Polaroid film type, Time-Zero, which was discontinued in 2006.  I use it in my favorite camera, the SX-70.  This installment of a series about the film/camera combination is a little out of sequence, as I wrote last time about working with expired film.  Before that I had written about the painterly qualities of the film but, in so doing, completely failed to include examples of one of the most beautiful qualities of Time-Zero film, which is its gorgeous expression of blues and cyans.  It’s for this quality that I will probably most miss my Time-Zero film.

The beauty of the skies over Lake Superior is sometimes best captured by this eloquent film type…

Photographing Instances of Light

The blues, which really don’t need description, work for portraiture, too.

Portrait with Light

The computer display just fails to adequately portray the special qualities of the film, which is how this Polaroid of Lake Superior came by its title Lost in Translation.

Lost in Translation

Lake Superior, Wisconsin…

Blue Morning

Sometimes the blues are just pure poetry…

Water, Evening, Poetry

A Poem in Light

Finally, here’s one of my favorites from my stash of Polaroids… a result of an experiment I did to trick the SX-70 into doing long exposure times at the darker side of dusk.

Blue Is the Color of Night

The blues, as a theme for classifying Polaroids, makes for for an equivoque, which is very apropos, for it is the loss of these extraordinary blues that leaves me with the mood implied by the color.

The first in a series chronicling the transitions and decline of an aristocrat of film types, Polaroid Time-Zero film… Polaroids by Elinor Scott-Sutter.

Portrait of a Polaroid
Painted Light
Fire & Ice
The Blues
Memento