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Tuesday 31 January 2012

Happy Polaroid Accidents

Quite a few years and possibly many of your Moons ago, this image White Tulips

 won the Polaroid European Final Art Awards - colour print section

White Tulips




I should own up and say, I won it by default 

How it happened - I shot the image on 4”x 5” Polaroid Type 55 film

and to be honest I didn’t rate the image at all and filed it under

 Failures / sub-section - Never to be seen again.

Then I forgot about it.

Luckily an unprocessed Polaroid from the shoot fell down behind a bench in my incredibly damp 

darkroom.

When I say incredibly damp - think Troglodyte existence,

imagine mould spores mutating and meandering up the walls

Geologically, my darkroom provided a tunnel or escape route directly to Hades

Cathedral-like vaults full of stalactites and stalagmites, majestic curtains and surreal rock formations, and even a resident Hermit

In short a damp and smelly darkroom

The Polaroid festered there for a few years

from the Cretaceous Period to the Carboniferous

And then on one of those rare ‘Let’s clean the Darkroom’ days

I found the unprocessed Polaroid deep down in Hades growing and mutating some

unspeakable things

I gingerly picked it up and carried it out to the Light

and promptly forgot about it again

Then I processed it and low and behold the damp of ages had performed a miracle

it had degraded the image and added some interesting blemishes and Serious Stains

I found  myself in a      (position of Quite Liking it)

I scanned the negative, tinted it, made a print and sent it poste haste to Polaroid
and they liked it too.

I do miss Polaroid

https://paulbiddle.com