Ruined Polaroids

These pictures are taken with a camera that is, by most definitions, broken: an old Polaroid SX-70 camera that I rescued from a yard sale. With its first use I realized the camera wasn’t functioning properly. It sometimes spills out 2 pictures at a time and the film often gets stuck in the gears, exposing and mangling them in unpredictable ways. I've figured out how to control and accentuate aspects of the camera's flaws but the images themselves are always a surprise. Each one is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the film and the camera. Instantaneous, cheap and ubiquitous digital photography has long since replaced Polaroid film. In doing so it’s rendered the old technology antiquated for conventional image making. What Ruined Polaroids offers is a picture of the Polaroid process itself frozen in time and plucked out of the camera mid-gesture.