July 4, 2014

ABSOLUTE PHOTO MAG | OLIVER BLOHM (APP MAGAZINE)





OLIVER BLOHM

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In 2009 I found out about Polaroid and instant film, and the following year borrowed an SX-70 from a friend to shoot with in the summer. I wanted to use the SX-70 as it’s a small-sized, large-format camera and I filled empty integral film cassettes with large-format negatives and exposed them for a portrait project. It worked and I realised my first book project, SX-70 Negative. A year later I made a spontaneous purchase on eBay – a Polaroid 600SE. I started to work with the old Polaroid material, which is now my most used and loved medium. 


My favourite camera is my Polaroid 600SE. The camera has a great lens and changeable backs. I still love to play with the Polaroid SX-70 and sometimes I use my red Polaroid 645 CL to take spontaneous pictures too. One of my favourite cameras is the Rollei 35 LED, it‘s small and takes amazing pictures. My newest toy is an unlicensed Polaroid camera which uses the same film as the SX-70, it‘s a Keystone Wizard, or as I like to call it, ‘the tank’. 


Using Polaroid cameras successfully very much depends on the rules of photography. In my point of view you just need to find your own way to handle this little disaster. I love the old Polaroid material and I‘m very sad that I’d only just got to know it when Polaroid declared bankruptcy. Working with Impossible I sometimes find very strange. The biggest difference is that I used to work with the peel-a-part film whereas Impossible only produces the integral film. The long development times are often hard to handle but they‘re improving the chemicals and want to launch a new film in late summer which should show a picture after just a few minutes without colour, but you can see what you have after three or four minutes, which is a big step forward for them. The colours will then appear in around 20 minutes. With the developing times in my mind, one day I had the idea of heating the photographs while developing them – just for fun. I realised that they developed way faster, but that the heat destroyed the pictures. I already knew from previous experiments that it’s not helpful to cook them, so I decided to misuse my flatmate’s microwave. At first the radiation started to burn the pictures because of the metallic elements in the film, but at least the Polaroids developed in just a few minutes. I just needed to find a way to save the photograph and get better control of the nuking process. In the end, I was able to reduce the development time of 40 minutes to three to five minutes. 


Nearly all my photos are made with analogue material, preferably with old Polaroid film, which has its own aura, look and feel. That includes the mistakes and failures depending on the chemicals, which is often very old and out of date. This characteristic generates unique and surreal structures as well as missing parts of the image. The material is not 100% predictable and for me, that creates room for the unexpected.

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ABSOLUTE PHOTO MAG