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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