I’ve written previously about my love for my Polaroid Land Camera, a wonder with bellows from the 1960s that produced relentlessly gorgeous 3.25″ x 4.25″ images on Polaroid Peel-Apart media in just three minutes. Polaroid as a company ceased to exist in the form we know it, and production of Peel-apart film ceased more than a decade ago. Fuji’s version of compatible film was too fast for my camera AND ceased production, leaving millions of gorgeous cameras out in the world without a film supplier.
Some wild Austrians (the name of my next book of poetry?) decided to HAND MAKE their own version of peel-apart film, and I rushed to support them. Their product was ready to ship just as the global COVID epidemic was cancelling every form of transport that they could use to get their product out… And when it arrived, I wasn’t supposed to leave the house at all. So their hard work sat in my cold garage for a few years before I had the chance to load up my camera and go outside.
Five color prints with irregular edges featuring Mission Creek and its surroundings in San Francisco. The text notes that this is 2020 SuperSense media shot in 2023 in a Polaroid Land Camera.
The lovingly packaged, individual film units allowed one image to be loaded and exposed at a time. After several failures on my part, the assembly worked, but the time spent in my garage may have taken some toll: the developer packets were VERY wet, struggled to spread evenly (despite reasonable efforts to pull the film straight out of the camera), and produced interesting artifacts. The colors were pleasing. I exposed more than a dozen images, and after each exposure I had to clean the camera, as the developer both flooded the print and soaked the rollers.
The results were “gooey:” I took to wearing nitrile gloves AND bringing enough cloth to mop up the camera between exposures. For some reason, the prints failed to fit into my Polaroid Drying Box (a real thing that used to exist in the world), and I couldn’t figure out how to dry them off without damaging their surfaces. Sadly, they sat on my desk being sticky until they got dusty and I tossed them out.
I understand that feedback from users modified the SuperSense team’s approach, and they now offer advice on washing and drying the results, which is great. As they required 20 minutes per print to assemble the units by hand, the SuperSense team has decided to launch a build-your-own kit, which I plan to try despite the astronomical price ($128 for an 8-print kit, coming to $16/image excluding shipping from Europe!).
So: this was a fun but expensive experiment.