Last autumn (2009) I shot a pack of exquisitely expired Time-Zero film, and the results were primordial. At about that same time I was reading up on Dreamtime. The photos coincidentally reflected the materials I was reading, and so the series ended up with The Time Before Time as a title.
The Time Before Time
The Time Before Time, 2
The Time Before Time, 3
The Time Before Time, 4
Recently, I began shooting the last of my Time-Zero. Polaroid photographers know just what a painful statement that is to make. The film is rapidly becoming degraded, though, and any effort to save it at this point is only an opportunity for loss. The last pack I shot had an expiration date of December 2006, meaning it was a fairly new pack of Time-Zero, and I had arranged to film these shots during their developing process with a fellow artist. The initial shots I got from it were quite black and rose, and those are the shots from the pack that I’m including here.
To shoot this pack of film, I visited the home of an artist who is a musician, painter, and actor, who is very photographable and who had agreed to help me film the Polaroids. Chad is the upright bass player for a Twin Cities band Hot Rod Hearse, and the painting in the second portrait is his own.
a portrait of a musician
portrait of an artist
It was enjoyable to photograph someone who was not part of my list of usual suspects for models (my daughter, my son, their playmates, or my friend Lindsay). I liked the experience so much that I am thinking of beginning a project of photographing artists of all kinds in their natural environments.
Anyway, because we were filming the the Polaroids in their developing process, I wanted to do a few still life photos which would be simple and visually pleasing to watch develop. We took a few objects from Chad’s shelves, beginning with a ballerina figuring presumably belonging to his wife and finishing up with an evil little gnome.
a dancer for sophie
another little dancer
There were a few characteristically blue shots from this pack of Time-Zero, but I will include them in a separate blog entry, since they do not belong visually with these.
Thanks for Visiting,
Elinor
elinor@equivoquephoto.com
equivoquephoto
My Flickr Photostream
Posted in Photography, Polaroid
Tagged elinor, equivoque, expired film, film photography, fine art photography, garden of the ordinary, instant film, instant light, instant photography, nostalgia, painted light, Photography, poetry, Polaroid, polaroid photography, portrait, portraiture, still life, sx-70, time-zero
I’ve been experimenting with ways to get color with which I can live from Artistic Time-Zero film. Sometimes it takes more than just a little of this, that, or the other to get the Polas to develop into something I like. This last batch of experiments rendered some results I love, in terms of color.
Here’s my favorite of the last set of experiments. Traces from a past life…
Traces of a Past Life
A Phalaenopsis (moth orchid)…
Opalescence
Opalescence, 2
Another portrait of my daughter…
Surfacing from Dreams
Thanks for taking the time to look,
Elinor
www.equivoquephoto.com
equivoque.etsy.com
This winter has been very long. I had been leaving to work in utter darkness each morning and returning home to greet dusk, but, yes, there is finally daylight when I get home from work at the end of the day! Winter has made it difficult to find opportunities to shoot. Recently, however, I bought a Phalaenopsis (a moth orchid) as a prop to phot0graph in the late afternoon light in the kitchen. I also cracked open a Magic Pack of Time-Zero given to me by a special friend in addition to a pack of 100 Chocolate film that I bought from Polapremium. Shooting both types of film definitely brought a bit of levity back to my life, and the Choco turned out to be something I love.
The Chocolate Addiction: Composing with the Land camera, especially with a closeup attachment (as was done here) is not an easy thing. There is a lot of parallex error, and it takes time and a considerable wastage of film to learn to compose with the mind’s eye rather than with the viewfinder. Anyway, this 100 Chocolate film, with its rich contrast and lovely crackelure, has earned my affection along with my other favorite film types, Neopan and Time-Zero. My newly acquired love of chocolate.
Child of Mine
The Obsession: I’ve been inclined towards nurturing my own obsessions throughout the course of my life. I used to have a wild passion for orchids and owned and cared for hundreds of them! Now they find their place in my life as occasional props for Polaroid photography. Time-Zero film has been been the object of my affection for a long time now, though. I hope I’m not like the fellow in Adaptation who says, “Fuck fish“. I probably am, just a little, but I think my passion for photography is going to stick.
Sea Butterfly
Sea Butterflies
Obsession
Thanks for looking at my photographs,
Elinor
Posted in Photography, Polaroid
Tagged adaptation, b/w photography, black and white portraiture, botanical, chocolate film, elinor, elinor scott-sutter, equivoque, expired film, film photography, fine art photography, fuck fish, garden of the ordinary, instant film, instant light, instant photography, land camera, orchids, phalaenopsis, Photography, Polaroid, polaroid photography, portrait, portraiture, still life, sx-70, time-zero
We play at Paste —
Till qualified, for Pearl — Ms. Emily Dickinson
Ms Dickinson
I have loved the words and works of Ms. Dickinson since high school when I encountered the poem To make a prairie, but her words have never had such direct application to my life as last night when I began helping my daughter make jewelry. Mind you, I do not know how to make jewelry. My ten year daughter, however, desired to make necklaces, earrings, and so forth from glass beads. She also wanted to open an Etsy Shop called Clementine’s Corner where she might eventually sell her creations (with me overseeing her shop, of course). Knowing that my daughter’s goal was well within her artistic capabilities, I agreed. In any case, I had already decided that I wanted to learn to make jewelry so that I might incorporate my Polaroid photography in those creations. Last night we went to Michael’s to get some framing done and decided to look for beads there. Oh, we contemplated the beautiful and expensive beads we saw there but eventually settled on an inexpensive kit that came equipped with most of the supplies we needed to begin. We definitely need to play with paste before we graduate to pearl!
Whenever a photographer uses expired film, surprise will be an element of the result. While the photographer cannot place all his or her hope in interesting effects, however, he or she cannot count on entirely controlling the result either. Before I began this little series on working with Time-Zero film (both fresh and expired), I had written an entry about a very special pack of Time-Zero that I received from a friend, for after I shot the pack, I found myself craving its magic again and again. Though I will not repeat the photos from that entry here, I would like to conclude this series with photos from the black magic pack because they illustrate more than any of my Polaroids how rewarding working with expired film can be.
This is my personal favorite from my own portfolio… Polaroid and otherwise. The deep roses, blacks, and blues that the magic pack of film yielded worked beautifully with this model’s skin. This little objet d’art remains my memento of something treasured that cannot be duplicated ever again.
memento from the underworld
I was playing with the length of the exposure time in the following shot. In this case, I used the SX-70’s dial to “overexpose” the shot. The other blog entry features some of the darker versions of the still life.
decay and melancholy
In conclusion, then, it is certain that I’ll not have a chance to shoot non-expired Time-Zero film in all its glory again, it is highly unlikely that I will have the the opportunity to have in my possession something like the black magic pack again, but I have about 92 shots of expired Time-Zero film in its various stages of blossoming and decay waiting for me in the refrigerator. Hopefully, I’ll be able to shoot something worthy of the film with it. Thank you for taking the time to look at my Polaroids.
The fourth and last 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
Posted in Photography, Polaroid
Tagged elinor, elinor scott-sutter, equivoque, expired film, garden of the ordinary, Polaroid, portrait, portraiture, still life, sx-70, time-zero
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
Posted in Photography, Polaroid
Tagged blues, elinor scott-sutter, equivoque, lake superior, Photography, poetry, Polaroid, portrait, sx-70, time-zero, waterscape
Not too long ago, an online friend of mine said facetiously, while defending his choice to use toy cameras and expired film, “It’s just a matter of praying as hard as you can for the end result not to be crap.” Of course, the opposite of that statement is true. If you want your end results “not to be crap” when working with toy cameras or expired film, you must work hard, as you would with any other tools, and pay attention to what you are doing. Possibly even more attention than when working with ordinary equipment and media.
I learned as much when I found myself in the unenviable predicament of being required to work with expired film if I wanted to continue to work with my preferred film and camera combination. Of course, there wasn’t really a choice. It’s not that I wanted to continue to work with Time-Zero film in my SX-70. I had to. I had spent a lot of time observing my camera’s behavior in different situations, but with the high cost of even expired film, it became more necessary than ever to quickly discover the limitations and features of an expired pack to best incorporate the attributes of the film into the photos. Each pack is unique, making the task even tougher. I miss my non-expired Time-Zero film, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the results I’ve had from my expired film.
Here’s one of my favorite models again. She is also a photographer, and we were shooting together on the ice of Lake Superior.
The Fire in Her Eye
From the same day on the ice…
Aurora Borealis
Sometimes the results can be singular…
Singular
Sometimes the additions to what the photo might be are like gold…
passage
My hipster daughter…
Old School
The reds from expired Time-Zero can burn red if the light is warm enough, as is the case here.
the light of sweet remembrance
While the welcome accidents certainly play their role in shooting expired film, planning goes a long way to ensure the judicious use of precious film. I will keep shooting till the money runs out.
The second 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
Most people know by now that Polaroid recently stopped manufacturing film cameras and all the Polaroid film types. I don’t think the general public was really prepared in advance for the loss of an American institution such as Polaroid instant photography, but we who love Polaroid photography got our first taste of what can only be described as panic when we began to see seemingly innocuous notices such as this one, announcing the end of manufacture of Time-Zero film, on Polaroid’s website. The author wrote in a cordial understatement, “We realise that this is disappointing news for our loyal SX-70 users and we would like to underline that, although the circumstances made it inevitable, it was not an easy decision… We are very sorry for the inconvenience.” If by inconvenience the writer meant the first time in the history of photography that an entire medium would be taken away from the photographers who loved and used it, then it was a convenience.
For me, though, it was much, much more than an inconvenience. I was one of the many artists who had come to rely almost solely on Polaroid film types to express my passion for instances of light. Since I have only 82 shots left of my favorite film, which is Time-Zero film, I have devised ways to work with and view my Time-Zero Polas without having to use more of the film just yet. It was when I began sorting my Polas into categories according to the degree to which the film was or was not expired that a story emerged. I was surprised to see how the story of my development as a photographer paralleled the story of the decline of the excellent film; my style was growing a little more “esoteric” to match the effects I was getting from the expired film. Even the beginning of the story is a bit sad, because there will never be fresh Time-Zero film again. Everything that remains is expired, but there was once the film that I affectionately call Painted Light.
The dreamlike and painterly qualities of Time-Zero film are really accentuated by the use of a camera such as the Pronto! B, which lacks the ability to accurately focus on an image. Instead, the photographer estimates the distance of the subject and sets a dial accordingly.
Painted Light
A 1960s wedding gown makes the perfect nostalgic subject for a Polaroid. This is my mother’s 1962 wedding gown. The camera was the Pronto! B. The model, once again, is Lindsay. The girlfriend of my oldest son, she is one of my favorite models. The light becomes her, and she becomes light…
Becoming Light
The image of this peony in evening light was taken with my favorite camera, the Polaroid SX-70 Model 2. Because the SX-70 (aperture range f/8- f/22) determines how wide its aperture will be based on the available light, the photographer has very little control over the depth of field, except to choose the lighting that will result in the desired aperture width. I’ve gotten to know my SX-70 quite well, how it will behave under different lighting conditions, and so forth. I actually gravitate towards lower light settings for the SX-70. The aperture opens up nice and wide, which really yields some dreamlike results with Time-Zero film. This simple peony appears almost painted. It is the color of dreaming…
The Color of Dreaming
The next photo is one of my favorite portraits of my daughter… It isn’t a surprise to those of us who know and love her that, when she finds a piece of wood on the beach, she picks it up, draws a face on it, and names it… In this case, she named it Chunky.
“Some ideas arrive in the form of a dream…”
–The Log Lady in David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks
In the Form of a Dream
Time-Zero interprets light with grace and perhaps a bit of magic…
Of Light and Magic
A detail from vintage signage that is still in use in Grand Marais, MN:
RIG
Late summer… How can a body be so filled with possibility (of love and of drenching the senses with sensations from an almost autumn afternoon) that really it is too much for the senses?
The Stars of Summer
Finally, here is a loose quote in Time-Zero of a portrait of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz.
Morning Song
Time-Zero film, whose sad disappearance was a result of a series of complicated and unforunate events, is an exquisite and extraordinary film type, and its beauty and elegance is painfully underscored by the stranger and darker iterations resulting from its aging. I wish future photographers would be fortunate enough to have the opportunity and pleasure of working with it, but they will only be able to enjoy its finery by looking at the Polaroids of others. The blog is the first in a series chronicling the film in its transition from painted light to its bittersweet decline.
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
1Instant est un collectif d’aritistes adeptes du film instantané Polaroid…
GALERIE CONTRASTE
26 rue de la Rosière d’Artois
44000 Nantes
The current set of original Polaroids is on display at GALERIE CONTRASTE in Nantes until October 12th. I have agreed to loan my Polaroid to the collectif until October 2009. My Polaroid is the one on the left just behind the gentleman in the red sweater. I wish I could have attended the festivities in France!
The Polaroid is one I took using 600 film in my trusty old SX-70. I placed the Pola in the freezer immediately for its developing process. A lot of people have asked me, because its title is Frozen Ghosts, whether I scanned it while it was developing. I did not. I scanned it quite a few months after I took the photo!
a garden of the ordinary 