KimElliott.net

Recently some pretty weird stuff has been happening in my life. I was thinking about how I’d like to chronicle these events through photographs. While I have a digital camera, I thought a Polaroid might be more fitting and ultimately more satisfying. It’s been a few years since my last Polaroid camera, but I still remember the weight on my wrist, the clunky whirr as the camera spits out an image and the anticipation as the photograph develops.

I was sad to learn that Polaroid stopped producing instant film back in February. They’re now working on a little instant printer, due sometime in 2009. Not the same. However, I looked through some of the Polaroid photographs I own and suddenly they seemed far more special than before. A nice piece of history, never to be added to.

A few days after all this, I came across an article about a man who took a single Polaroid shot daily to record his life for eighteen years, until his death from a brain tumour on his 41st birthday. His name was Jamie Livingston, a New York artist. The full collection of his images, posted by his friend Hugh Crawford, can be viewed here.