10 Months Of Polaroids

Ten months ago I decided that I wanted to start taking polaroids. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to take polaroid photography. Maybe it was because it was popular, The fact that I’m a sucker for vintage things and it looked cool. Shortly after I got the camera I started looking online for ideas to take pictures. I stumbled upon a website called Photo of The Day and that’s exactly what it is. There is a polaroid picture for everyday for eighteen years. The interesting thing is that the website doesn’t have a “about me” or much of an explanation. I soon realized that all those photos were taken by one man and his name was Jamie Livingston. I didn’t want to google him because that didn’t seem right, I wanted to figure out who he was through his photos. What I learned was that he lived in a city and worked in the movie industry. He took a photo everyday from 1979 to 1997. As I looked through the photos and got near the end it was clear that he was sick. He had cancer. He took photos of going to chemotherapy and having a bald head. Then I saw the last photo and one could assume that he died from cancer. He died on October 25, 1997, a few days before I would be born. 

What I loved about his photos was that they were so simple. It looked like he saw something he thought was interesting and took a picture of it. Some of them are beautiful, some are sad and some are weird. Those photos probably meant something to him though. I mean he wouldn’t have kept taking them if they didn’t. Each of those Polaroids had a story behind them and he knew what they were. Maybe those pictures were more for him then they were for other people. I doubt he ever imagined that there would be a website one day with all of his pictures on it.

I was inspired by what Jamie did and I wanted to do something like it. I knew that I couldn’t afford to take a polaroid every single day but I made a promise. I promised myself that I would take a polaroid of things that were special or random. I wasn’t going to think about ‘wasting’ the film. I didn’t know exactly what I considered ‘special’ until I started taking the photos. The things that were important to me were people, my friends, places I loved, hard times and absolutely random photos. After I took the photo I put it in my journal and rarely looked at them. I was talking to DL and she pointed out that I wasn’t able to see or share the photos. The more I thought about it the more I realized that she was right. When I  thought about my polaroids I didn’t really know what I saw. They seemed like random pictures and I could only remember a few. 

I spent about an hour or two taking out most of the polaroids in my journals, I ordered a photo album and I counted the ones I took out, it was 90 polaroids. Then I tried to think about the polaroids that were in my journals and framed ones. I probably have a hundred plus polaroids. As I looked through them I was shocked. These pictures were special and beautiful. I remembered every story behind each photo. Tears welled up in my eyes as I looked at each memory captured in a tiny photo. I took pictures of my friends, a place I had a panic attack at, stores I went to, Deep Creek, a cactus I bought and named ‘Tina’, the front view of Swag’s house before they sold it, the creek where we made the ‘Huckleberry Finn’ project, family gatherings, my dogs etc. Every single picture had a story and they were all important to me. When I look through some of my journals the majority of the time I note how my life is ‘boring’. When I look at these polaroids I see the opposite. Like Jamie’s, my polaroids captured my life, the people in it and the places I went to. When I talk about how ‘boring’ my life is I ignore the pictures that I’ve taken and the value they carry. Maybe that was the biggest lesson I was supposed to learn while taking pictures. 

Jamie's Website

DFTBA
-AB