The first time I approached instant photography was at the beginning of the 2000 years. Being born in the seventies I had certainly owned a polaroid during my adolescence, like many of my peers, but in truth I had never fully understood the expressive possibilities and consequently I had never contemplated using this type of photographic medium as an expression artistic.

At the time I was already developing and printing in black and white from around 10 years, but I was looking for something different, more artistic, that would allow me to create something unique. It was during this research that I came across the books of Kathleen T. Carr on the manipulations and transfers of emulsion and I was inspired to buy my first (and even only hour) land camera sx-70. At the time, Time-zero films were still available, which lent themselves to the manipulations of emulsions that reminded me so much of watercolor painting. For image and emulsion transfers I bought a Vivitar Polaroid, which allowed me to print from a slide on a polaroid peel-apart 4 × 5 film.

The idyll of that period between me and my Polaroids, however, was destined to end when the Polaroid announced the suspension of the production of all its films. So I put my left-70 and my Vivitar in cellophane and almost forgot about it. But in the 2017 the Impossible Project he tried just the impossible, trying to recover the production of instant films, which however had to be produced in a different way from those that preceded them, offering different possibilities regarding the techniques that had fascinated me. But it didn't matter to me at that moment ... the important thing was that I could finally throw away that cellophane!

What drives me to continue taking instant photography despite the undeniable high costs and inherent anachronism of the technique? Well mine is anything but a habit, but rather a way to make vintage photography without using digital filters of which the web today is unfortunately saturated ... why pretend a retro look when you can still make real retro photography? Apart from the look, undoubtedly unmistakable of the Polaroids and the instax fujis (very different from each other but equally peculiar), I must confess that I rediscovered a type of emotion that I had forgotten: going to a place, looking around, looking for the perfect angle, stop and think, exercise the right / duty to renounce if the light and the shots are not perfect (and given the not inconsiderable cost of every single photo), and finally the expectation of seeing the image appear. An image that I believe is never entirely created by the photographer, but is a creation shared with the machine, which adds its imperfections, some distinctive features of the model, and other expressions of the history of the single camera because it is also the result of its state of maintenance, and not least an expression of the film, which with its dominant and contrasts adds what the photographer could only have imagined up to that point. Instant photography is for me image and matter, a photograph at 4 mani, the two of the photographer and the rest of the equipment used.

Polaroid

Fujifilm