Nearly 35 years ago, long before the internet and email, the fastest way to transmit a drawing to someone far away was facsimile, commonly called a fax. I had recently graduated from architecture school and was living in my parent’s basement near Atlantic City, NJ. when I started collaborating remotely with one of my closest college friends, who had relocated to Los Angeles.
Our biggest challenge, being four time zones and 2,500 miles apart, was how to share design ideas quickly and concisely. The fax machine became our most valuable tool. At first, we faxed sketches back and forth as designs developed. But we soon realized that to share complex 3D ideas required physical modeling. This was at least a decade before computer 3D modeling.
To facilitate fast 3D ideas, we developed a process of quick sketch modeling (rapid prototyping), instant photos, and faxing. The only instant photo option at the time was Polaroid. My design partner borrowed a Spectrum camera from the art department at the University where he was teaching, and I purchased a ProPack, one of the last peal-apart film cameras Polaroid made.
Although the instant photos were vital to our architectural design collaborations, my pack camera really became an essential part of my photographic design expression. In the mid-nineties I was visiting an art gallery in Charlotte, NC and discovered peal-apart image transfers. I had never seen anything like them, and I was hooked.
As part of its decline, and ultimate demise, Polaroid ceased production of peal-apart film more than fifteen years ago. And although Fuji continued making it, they too stopped in 2018. I still have a dozen or so boxes of peal-apart film, but my instant photo interests have shifted primarily to integral film. I own a number of vintage and new cameras – a refurbished SX-70, a Now, a Sun 600, and the newest Polaroid I-2. There’s something special and interesting about each one.
My goal with this blog is to provide a behind the scenes view of my Polaroid journey, its ups and downs, along with thoughts and insights about product, craft, strategy, events, activity, and more. I hope it can be an analog refuge in a digital world, and a place that provides something of value.