In late February of 2020 I traveled home to Pittsburgh to salvage what I could of my grandparents’ lives. After caring for them and their things during their final years and after, my aunt was moving to Florida and giving it all away: furniture and dinnerware; my grandmother’s full collection of Emmett Kelly clown figurines; the large, haunting oil paintings she made of the very same clown-man. I was drawn to the photos. They were in a boxed archive spanning back to the 1950s, and I spread them out over what had been my grandparents’ bed, enjoying the feeling of time as I did it: every era of my family, jumbled but contained. Point-and-shoot glossies of my now-policeman cousin as a baby in the nineties. Black-and-whites of my now-retired father standing in formation as a Civil Air Patrol cadet. But the aughts were dominated by a single format: the Polaroid. And the images weren’t carefully composed like in the decades before. They were mundane. My father standing in a doorway. Me at a kitchen table, home from grad school, doodling on a tablet. The frames were annotated and dated in my grandmother’s handwriting: mike – 3-18-06 / at – grandparent.
The date on that photo was early in what would become for her a grueling bout with dementia. Soon she’d lose weight and become frail. Then she’d lose her sense of narrative and become frightened, obscured within her own life. But on that day she was only losing her relationship with time. Holding her Polaroids years later, it was clear: she’d taken them to repair it. The photos were flashcards, her own doomed Leonard Shelby experiment to steady the frightening mystery of each new day. For a while, I thought she took the Polaroids to remember who we were. But now I think she took them to remember herself, or who she was to the family she’d apparently built, all of us sudden, obnoxious strangers to her, rummaging around her life, knowing more about it than she did.
Within weeks of that trip, I lost my relationship with time, too. It happened right when you did. I won’t cite the takes. You’ve read them, your face close to a screen, begging to be told how to be now, as a virus burned through the world and made it unrecognizable and frightening. You already know how awful the present was. And maybe, like my grandmother, you tried to repair it by baking bread, or protesting, or compulsively sewing masks for people, or learning to give yourself haircuts, or praying openly and online that the President of the United States, who suggested that we should all inject ourselves with bleach, would die.
I reached for the same tools that my grandmother used, the old Polaroid cameras I’d taken from what was once her home, which I cleaned and cared for, then carried out into our new, time-broken world, panicked and unsure of what I’d see.
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When people ask me why I shoot Polaroids, I lie to them. I say that it “got me out of the apartment” during lockdown, or that I enjoy the “imperfection” of instant film, or how the image on a developed Polaroid “feels like a memory,” or how “every frame is an object.” “Physical media,” I’ll say proudly. “You can hold this moment in your hand.” Or maybe I’ll talk about how I’m drawn to the tragedy of Polaroid the brand, and its founder, Edwin Land, and how he was a proto–Steve Jobs who, after inventing the revolutionary Land camera—the first to shoot film that produced “instant” images without a darkroom, but not without someone yanking the positive and negative sides from the camera by force—yearned for something simpler, more intimate. So he spent the late sixties and early seventies replacing his once-cumbersome Land cameras with the foldable, portable SX-70, and creating integral film, which developed itself and remains the film type most widely associated with the Polaroid—imagine the boxy profile, the refrain in that old Outkast song. It was a “kind of photography,” Land pronounced in 1970, “that would become part of the human being.” Which is the point at which I’ll note the cruel irony of how the actual Steve Jobs made an internet phone, years later, that outdid Edwin Land and his life’s work in almost every way.
But in truth I started shooting Polaroids because I thought I was going to die. My reasons were no more different or interesting than anyone else’s (comorbidities related to my chronic illness). I lived in New York City during the shutdowns, like a lot of people, without the means to leave, like a lot of people, and I spent those early days and months fixated on death without pause. I’d take a walk, turn a corner, and see a block lined with refrigerated morgue trucks to handle the overflow from the hospitals nearby. The sound of another siren would invade my apartment walls and I’d envision myself in the ambulance of its origin, screaming through the empty streets.
So I shot instant photos, first in my neighborhood, then in the neighborhoods surrounding. There was a mania to it. Photography, to quote Nan Goldin, as a way to walk through fear. I’d leave my apartment after a workday and shoot anything that felt like the panic I couldn’t rid myself of. A home affixed with a wide, black sign reading trump lies. Handmade signs on bodegas explaining indefinite closures. The text message that appeared on my phone to notify me of my father’s first positive PCR result. A bald man on a stoop, playing sad accordion songs on a bright, warm Saturday. I felt in good company with the noise of that mania, the clap of the SLR mirror on the old SX-70 I’d had restored. The mechanical whir of the film ejecting, how it often turned the heads of people passing. I bought so much film so frequently from an all-analog company in Milwaukee—one of few who shipped anything that early—that by May of 2020 a staff member emailed me. “Thank you for the film purchases!” he wrote, in an accent that read to me as vaguely European. “I wish to use film at the rate you do! I am a bit too conservative in how I shoot,” he wrote. “Goals!”
On my walks I sometimes thought about NY Ghost, the anonymous photo blog run by Candace Chen, one of the survivors of the global pandemic that drives the plot of Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance. “A deep, grim satisfaction buoyed me,” Chen says of her own photo walks through New York City, which were inspired by Seph Lawless and Robert Polidori, who shot vital slices of humanity as they were abandoned or destroyed. “Even if capturing the city in deterioration was an insurmountable task,” Chen says, “I didn’t want to stop.” As Severance’s fictional virus spreads—transmitted by nostalgia—chunks of the world seize up. Structures atrophy and fail. News outlets and websites halt, sending people to NY Ghost, where they make requests of Chen, and suggest photo assignments based on what they long to see again, even in its diminished form. Chen’s audience becomes anyone dangerously hungry for evidence of a recognizable world.
But our very real pandemic had no shortage of documentation. You remember. We showed every bit of evidence of our deterioration to each other as it happened: one massive, fractal mirror made of real-time news footage and social feeds and dispatches and data, all of it exhaustively covering the same story. The roles of reporter and subject merged; we were the broadcast wave and its near-instant destination. I remember one day looking out of my apartment window to the building across my street, where a man in full vestments preached alone on his rooftop into an iPad, a sermon, I assumed, to a congregation who could no longer gather. We were all making NY Ghost and we were all frantically reading it. And I remember the steady pulse of loneliness I experienced amid all of that ever-presence. Maybe you felt it, too. Maybe you still feel it, or at least the trace of its shape, the sense of feeling stranded in that ever-presence, adrift in a sea of echoing fear.
When I came home from my Polaroid walks I scarcely shared them online. Instead, I annotated them, as my grandmother did. Date / location / short description. Then I slid them into albums—my Polaroid diary—and enjoyed thinking of a future person as I did, someone nameless, who didn’t know me or my experience. I liked to imagine this person in my home, weeks or months or decades after I’d failed to live through our current moment and its boundless crisis. I liked the idea of this person, whoever it would be, flipping through the pages of my Polaroid diary, looking at the memory-like images, reading the annotations. It felt good to abandon the present in this way. That instant film could live on as both image and object—that the moments I shot could be held on it, but also filed away, forgotten about and recovered—made it an ideal future archive. A message in a bottle. This was it, it said. This was the end for me.
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It should be zero surprise, then, that the photographers I found most interesting communed with the future in some bruised and aching way. Jamel Shabazz, who captured a 1980s New York City on the verge of being swallowed up by the crack epidemic, called it “alchemy” how his joyful, everyday street portraits evolved through decades, delivering to the survivors of that crisis the bittersweet fortune of reconnecting, much later, with the ghosts of people they lost to it. Stephen Shore thought about Walker Evans’s phrase “transcendent documents” as he toured steel towns with a camera in the late seventies, making a future archive of a vanishing rust belt economy. LaToya Ruby Frazier on her thirteen-year-long effort to photograph the deterioration of her family and the Mon Valley town that poisoned them: “it’s a history book.”
But those are professionals, who shoot 35mm and medium-format film on wildly intricate cameras with involved development processes. Give me the boxy, modest Polaroid, if only for its defiance, even of its creator. While poor Edwin Land was fixated on creating “the realization of an impulse,” something that could be “an adjunct to your memory,” what he couldn’t know, as the future unfolded beyond him, was that his creation’s enduring value would prove to be its relationship to every time but the present. Each frame of integral film is a small, square machine with an even smaller chemistry set inside of it, working at a pace of any time but now. It can take up to fifteen minutes for an image to appear, but the chemicals at work in one Polaroid frame can take up to a month to develop that image in full. That means that an impulse you have in June isn’t truly realized until July, which could be why every exposed Polaroid feels like a found object, even if it’s never been lost.
Maybe that’s why it’s been a medium of choice for artists who explore time’s elasticity, particularly filmmakers. Andrei Tarkovsky, who believed cinema could “fix time” (see Polaris, Mirror), got hooked on taking Polaroids while location-scouting for 1983’s Nostalghia, which closes with a nine-minute-long take of someone attempting to walk the distance of an empty pool while attempting to keep a single candle lit in his hands. “Tarkovsky thought a lot about the ‘flight’ of time,” his friend Tonino Guerra later recalled, “and wanted to do only one thing: to stop it—even if only for a moment, on the pictures of the Polaroid camera.” The results are photos that are underexposed but also underworldly, each frame vibrating with shadowy portent, every subject seeming petrified to leave the moment, but also imprisoned by it.
For Wim Wenders the Polaroid was less about stopping time, and instead about feeling undone by it—at first, anyway. In 1974’s Alice in the Cities, Wenders created a journalist alterego, Rüdiger Vogler’s Philip, who grows so deeply despondent while on assignment to write about “the American landscape” that he can only bear to look at it through the viewfinder of a Polaroid SX-70. Spoiler: It doesn’t help. “All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever,” Philip later says of his weeks driving through the endlessness of America, haunted by a terrain so bleak that not even the dreamy, instant emulsion of his constant Polaroids could elevate it. But decades later, in 2017, after Wenders himself rediscovered thousands of his own forgotten Polaroids of Americana and curated them for a show in London, they didn’t appear to him or critics as documents of bleakness anymore. They’d transformed into preservation spells. Tarkovskyesque. In interviews around that time, Wenders talked about the modern hyper-replication of images—sharing and memes, a new kind of endlessness—and how the Polaroid is its antidote, “a true thing, a singular object of its own, not a copy, not a print, not multipliable, not repeatable.” Richard Brody said Wenders’s work “conjures an entire lost world” of bygone America, and that the Polaroids were proof that he “experienced the present as the past.” Time had either evolved the original intention of Wenders’s Polaroids, or completely obliterated it.
That could be why when I shot them, aesthetics rarely came to mind. I consistently forgot to account for leading lines, or depth of field, or placement in the frame. Often I abandoned even the use of light and shadow, blanketing my subjects in a searing flash. I knew my photos were, artistically speaking, bad. I also didn’t care. For this one film type—part impulse, part artifact—the passage of time felt like the far truer composition. I liked that when I brought that camera to my face and triggered the shutter, the first thing I did after was wait. It let a quick fit of imagination set in, something expansive and affirming; a wide, composite world made with anticipation and excitement for what I or someone else will soon see, then see again, or differently, in the years that unfolded. Lately I’ve wondered if, in those early pandemic days, I needed a practice oriented toward later to trick myself into believing in the idea of it. I wonder if, in 2006, my grandmother needed the same.
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By luck and little else, the future materialized, and two years after that trip to Pittsburgh in February of 2020, I moved there. I was back home, where I grew up. My reasons for leaving New York City were no more different or interesting than anyone else’s (it was criminally expensive, my wife got a great gig). I brought with me three volumes of my Polaroid diary, one for each year, the density of each an obvious metaphor for the degree of mania I felt. They surged and receded in line with the pandemic’s jagged arc. 2020 and 2021 are so full of photos that the glue on the spines no longer holds.
Still, I kept a Polaroid camera with me, a safety blanket as I reinhabited home. One of my first efforts was to visit one of my oldest friends, Dove, whom I hadn’t seen for many years. We’d kept in touch the way ancient friends did—periodic texts on limited topics (the Steelers, how awful they were) and most recently a long phone call in the thick of the pandemic, in which Dove, usually acerbic and dour, had grown maudlin. “Fuck!” he’d yelled out every few minutes. “I miss you!” He’d experienced a dangerous kidney incident shortly before lockdown that had led to something chronic, and we’d talked about how the pandemic had us in its sights. How it was a matter of time for us sickos, ha ha, fuck us. I remember standing in my apartment’s living room after hanging up, thinking about how final our conversation felt.
So when I arrived at his home in the summer of 2022, we couldn’t stop laughing. It was an exhale. We’d known each other as teens who drank too much, then later as adults in recovery, and now we’d somehow lived on in yet one more way. It was unreal and almost silly how bright the sun was as we sat on his back porch. He’d hung a system of bird feeders that kept a pack of goldfinches hovering in the air while he smoked Marlboro Reds and failed to light even one burner on his grill to cook the stuffed peppers he’d made. The lot next to his home annexed a neighboring farm, and as an actual horse walked over and stood yards away, picking at the grass with its teeth, I almost didn’t believe it. It felt like a “full moment” simulation.
I made Dove pose for a Polaroid anyway.
I made everybody pose now. Maybe it was the occasion of the move, or the recession of the pandemic’s most acute danger. You remember how good it could feel sometimes, right? When time came back to us a little? Photography no longer helped me walk through fear. It helped to me to notice moments when I’d felt relief from it. The first haircut in a barber shop. The first dinner party. I took a few self-portraits even, and the person who appeared in them looked new, someone actually enthralled to be in the world.
It felt novel, to enjoy the feeling of time again. Like finding an old favorite tee shirt. Every Sunday back in Pittsburgh I drove out to Dove’s to eat whatever incredible food he cooked and watch the Steelers break our hearts. Soon our old buddy Jeff joined us, home to care for his father. We made plans for next week. We made plans for five years from now. We lingered after every game to keep talking. I drove home every Sunday with pain in my face from laughing so hard, and we texted in between the weekends to plan for the next. All the way through that fall we enjoyed each other, and the ways in which time had changed us but also kept us in place—how we were both who we’d always known, and who we’d each become. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was alchemy. I felt lucky to know how to recognize it now.
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And when Dove died of a heart attack in his home after the start of the new year, I knew at once what would happen to time. I knew how the present would grow strained again, and become unable to hold itself still.
I understood grief too well by now.
I suspect that you did, too.
We needed a decent photo to crowdfund Dove’s funeral costs, and I had one. I’ve told you about it. Dove on his back porch that sunny, impossible day. Hands on his hips, hat backwards. The photo helped raise money, and that was good. But as I scanned it, I was struck by how much I hated that Polaroid now, how it accelerated Dove’s presence as memory. The present and past were in early transom at best. Dove’s wry and hilarious text messages were still the first I saw on my phone. I could feel—can still feel—the sensation of being on his porch that day. I don’t trust that as time passes, I’ll continue to see my bitter, maudlin friend inside that frame. I worry that the fact of Dove’s death will turn that Polaroid into merely a product of it. I worry that it already has. And I resent that I know what’s coming: how I’ll forget Dove, and time will let me remember him again, and when I do, he’ll appear differently somehow. The inevitable alchemy. Right now I have no use for it.
At Dove’s memorial his mother handed me a pack of developed film, his disposable camera photos from a trip we took together twenty years before. She’d found them in his things, she said. She rushed to me as I was leaving, saying here here here. Soon after, she’d give Jeff the smoker on which her son cooked some of his most outstanding meals, eager for Dove’s things to live on with us; for his old friends to be the future people rummaging through his archive, the realizers of his death worries. I hope that time will let me feel fortunate for that. At present, I can’t look at those old photos for very long. And I don’t shoot many new photos these days, either. My first Polaroid of this year was of myself, moments after learning that Dove had died. There have been very few since. Sometimes I make myself take the camera out again, if only to fill the album. But in truth I don’t want to. It’s the year I lost my friend. Let the diary of it be thin. Let me cling to this awful present for only a little while longer.
October 2023