The rediscovery of the sun always makes me reach for the SX-70. I don’t know how that works, but it does.

I only have 8 packs of Polaroid film left!

Light Leaks Issue 11

I am excited to announce that I have a photo in the current issue of Light Leaks Magazine. Light Leaks is a venue for “low fidelity” photographers who use toy cameras, Polaroids, and alternative processes as part of their work. One of the photos from my “There are no straight lines in Brooklyn” series is reproduced in issue 11, the Polaroid issue, which is available now.

Hanson Place

I have been using the SX-70 quite a bit lately. Here are a few more Polaroids from the last week or so. It is interesting to me how the seasons creep in, just last week felt like summer and now there are dead leaves on the ground and the sun is hiding by 5:30. So it goes.

Douglass Street

Bond Street

South Portland Avenue

It’s been a good week for the Polaroid pictures, which is good, because I’m running out of film. I have been slowly but surely fine-tuning my gallery of Brooklyn Polaroid images, with a focus on a tighter edit and also thinking quite a bit about sequence. I think I need about a dozen more images and then I’ll be ready to make one of these.

Bond Street

Carroll Street

3rd Avenue, Brooklyn

Hoyt Street, Brooklyn

Bond Street, Brooklyn

When I bought my SX-70 for $20 on eBay, I really had no idea that I would be so smitten with the camera and the pictures that I am taking with it. I have found over the last few weeks that I have gotten better at predicting what the “polaroid effect” will do to an image and actively seeking out subjects that will benefit from that touch. I have been so happy with the results that I have created a new gallery in the “Current Work” section of the website. I have also set a goal for myself to take enough of these by the end of the summer to compile a small book, which I will probably make available through Blurb.com or another print-on-demand service.

It is fun to let go from time to time and improvise a bit with the camera. I had gotten so used to the razor sharp, perfectly composed photographs I tend to make with my Hasselblad that I had kind of forgotten that photography can be much more loose, where perfectly straight lines and tight compositions take a backseat to the overall “feel” of the image. It is freeing, and I also think it is giving me a much needed break so I can recharge before jumping into black and white when I go to Sicily next week.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

I am quite happy with the way these Polaroid photographs from the last couple of months have been coming out. The addition of color, compared to the black and white I usually shoot, feels light and easy; the freedom of using a handheld camera again is something else altogether. When I look back to a couple of years ago, taking pictures on these exact same streets, I am pretty amazed. I’ve been taking this same route to work for years now, but I feel like I’m seeing everything just a bit differently these days.

When I was four or five, my grandparents moved into a new house in Joshua Tree, California. Shortly after they moved in, they discovered that the previous owner, who had built the house, had died at home just a year before.

Needless to say, as soon as they found that out, all kinds of weird shit started happening. I should have mentioned at the beginning of this story that everyone in my family is completely mental.

Guests would remark on the strange noises they heard during the night. Someone insisted that they had seen the reflection of a face in the china cabinet in the dining room. Of course, this being the seventies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all high as a kite on goofballs, but still, it was enough to put a chill into my four-year-old heart. And then, the weirdest thing of all happened; something that is still a complete mystery to me to this day.

My grandparents had a big group of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Just as the meal was about to be served, my grandmother pulled out her Polaroid camera. Everyone leaned in and she snapped a picture of us at the table, and then, as the photograph developed, she gasped. There was a glowing white face, with bright red eyes, reflected in the glass of the china cabinet behind us.

I am getting goosebumps on my arms as I type this. My grandparents still have the picture, somewhere in storage. I don’t believe much in “paranormal phenomena”, but that picture gives me the heebie-jeebies to this day.

Truth is a funny thing. At this point, most of us are sophisticated enough to know that even a straight photograph doesn’t do much more than resemble the truth of the event it portrays. By the time an image has been filtered through the photographer’s eye, the camera’s lens, onto the film and back out into the world, even the simplest subjects have been filled with an awful lot of meaning. And yet, that unsophisticated family photograph—surely it must have been some strange kind of glare from the flash? or a practical joke played on us all by my grandfather?—has a tremendously deep meaning to me. It captures an important time in my childhood. It tells me something very specific about my family. So, whether or not that photograph holds any universal truth about the existence of ghosts, it certainly holds a great deal of personal truth for me.

Photograph by Dalton Rooney

The SX-70 gave me a lot of trouble today. Weird mechanical glitches caused a lot of over-exposed and blurry frames. At one point, it jammed and then spat three pieces of film at me all at the same time, all unexposed. I guess that’s what I get for buying a 30 year old camera on eBay for 20 bucks. I’m on the lookout for a spare.

While we’re on the subject of Polaroid, I came across this post today about a fellow who took a Polaroid every day for almost 20 years, right up until the day he died in 1997. There are 6,697 photographs in all, and it makes for a poignant and beautiful story.