Polaroid Adventures
I can’t shake the feeling that my teenaged self, when she took a Polaroid of a couple of artisans displaying their hand woven rugs in Oaxaca so long ago, unwittingly sent a ping out into the future universe, to catch my attention some 30 years later, as I prepared to go back to Oaxaca to photograph Dia de Muertos. And I, inspired by this prickle from the past, bought a Fuji Instax SQ20, to take with me to Mexico, to continue a story begun before the invention of the digital chip, personal computer, internet, and iPhone. Before I moved from gently rocking prints in trays of darkroom chemistry to studying the screen of a computer monitor.
It was not until I was living on a little freighter in the Caribbean when my daughter was a baby that I began to understand the effrontery of photographs taken without permission. After months of well-meaning tourists snapping her joyful play in the surf, my growing discomfort led to a visceral recognition of so-called primitive peoples’ belief that you steal a piece of someone’s soul with your camera. Since those days, I try to practice street photography as a chance at collaboration. If I take your photo, you get the first one and I get the second… and so much the better if instant film allows me to leave a bit of myself behind - a moment in time shared with another, now preserved in a 3x3 square of alchemy made of dyes, silver halide and intention.
Meanwhile, in 2019, I made copies of my old Polaroid, and went looking for the rug artisans in the picture when I got to Oaxaca. Incredibly, the first woman I showed the picture to turned out to be a daughter of one of them. She wept as she told me that he had passed away the previous year. Thus started an adventure that led to more family up in a tiny village in the hills outside Oaxaca, where I gave out copies of the original Polaroid, and then pulled out my new Fuji to make and leave behind instant portraits for a new generation, completing that circle I unwittingly started as my younger self .
Original Polaroid
Daughter of rug artisan
New generation of Fuji instant photos
