polaroid love

polaroid loveliness from rockmenow48 on flickr

I love the weird fadedness of Polaroid that makes everything look like memory, even nanoseconds after the event, I love the instant gratification of it, I love the effort of depressing the button and ‘CHK! Zzzzzzzz’ sound of your image burning into the film and being spat out, raw and undeveloped. I love the anticipation, watching it develop. I love the popping colour and the smoothed-out skin tones.

everydaypolaroid is lovely – getting the perfect shot is secondary to just recording…let it be known…I was here…I noticed this…this was one of my moments in a day in my finite quota of days…

I love this project to stun your grandchildren with this weird, antiquated image maker.

And then I stumbled across Polaroid A Day. Jamie Livingstone was a photographer, film-maker, and circus performer, who took a photograph a day each day for 18 years, from March 31, 1979, until his death from brain cancer on October 25, 1997. The photographs include friends, family, Mets games, meals, operations to remove the cancer from his brain, birthdays, engagement, and final stint in hospital. Sometimes I think all this self-documentation is just vanity and ego. But looking through this live thoroughly lived, and simply recorded, reminds me that it matters that we know we’re humans, we’re all humans, we have more in common than not. I matter. You matter. Trying to live well matters.