10 Frames – A Whole Pack of Polaroid SX70 – Venice 1995 #FullRollFriday by David Hume

I love a “Full Roll Friday” and I’ve done four of them in the past. But only one of mine was a full roll shot the conventional way – usually I’d find a way of cheating. And this piece is no exception because of course Polaroid SX70 did not come in a roll, it came in a pack of ten shots. (and later in its reincarnation by Impossible Project, eight shots.)

So this is a “The Whole Pack” story, and of course there’s another story or two behind that story. I recently bought a dedicated photo print scanner (Epson Fast Foto 680W ) and digitized 2500 family prints in shoeboxes around the house. Job done; it’s a great scanner, maybe I should do a quick review but there are a few on YouTube if you’re interested.  Now I’m lending it out to family and friends to do their family photos because it’s one of those things you use once and then don’t really need.

It has a setting for “Instant Photos” And that sent me rummaging for some SX70s I knew I had somewhere. I was given the camera in 1984 and used it sparingly (the cost!) until the mid 1990s.

Anyway, I found two boxes of prints I’d shot on a painting trip to Venice in January 1995. I’d gone there to make paintings for a couple of exhibitions, and the SX70 was the 1995 equivalent of a smart phone for visual note taking.

But I’d also started to get interested in photography. Initially I’d wanted to document my paintings, but later I began to see photography as an end in itself, and it quite usefully had become a way that I was starting to make some money. So as well as the Polaroid I’d also taken my Mamiya RB67 and Minox 35GT.

As well as purely documentary shots I began to think of projects. In those days you could get 24hr E6 processing as well as C41 done in Venice. It was so cold in Venice in January that I could only sit still and draw for half an hour before I froze, and walking was a good way to warm up.

So after my drawing stints I would walk. On that early trip I described Venice as “a city of glimpses.” By this I meant that as one walked, a series of vignettes would present themselves for an instant before vanishing. The view down a canal while crossing a bridge, a porter passing by with his trolley, a group of children going to school; small pieces of life that presented themselves for a moment and then were gone.

One type of these glimpses was that of boats passing by. A barge dropping off  boxes to a shop, or a small boat taking the kids to school. A water taxi perhaps, or a gondola of tourists passing under a bridge.

It was the bridges that got to me. I can still remember standing on a bridge watching the boats from above as they passed. I’m not sure why I took the first picture; but it must have intrigued me because I took another. I had limited film, and each shot was expensive, and that I was taking film away from the project, so I must have thought it was worth doing.

The SX70 is fully automatic, so the only way I could get the blur I liked was to shoot under the right amount of light. I’m guessing these are about ¼-to ½ a second, and I can’t remember what time of day they were, but obviously people were out and about. It’s pretty dingy around canals with buildings either side in the middle of winter is the only thing I can say for sure. I can’t remember over what interval I shot them, but I think it was not on the same day.

Back home in 1995 there were a couple I liked, and I paid to have them scanned; that was as modern as tomorrow back then, and it cost me a fair bit. But that’s where I left it.

So fast forward to my scanning safari 30 years later and I found a box called “2^nd rate shots” and here they are seeing the light of day.

Inspired by Wim Wenders’ book “Polaroid Stories” I decided to use this set as the basis for a photo book. Initially I thought I would only use my Venice Polaroids (I have another pack as well) but now I’m thinking of expanding it to include film photos, sketches, diary entries and finished works.

I’ll see how this plays out, and share the process with the good folk of 35mmc. One thing I found out already is that the Polaroids need to be life-size in print, otherwise they look odd. I think this applies only if it’s close but slightly off to the original size. I’ve actually reproduced SX70 shots 900 mm by 900 mm wide and I really like them, but when I printed them maybe 20% bigger than life they just looked wrong. Anyway, that experience has set the size and scale of my early experiments. Of course it could change but we’ll  see  what happens. What I have done is use the scale of an SX70 print to set the margins on an A5 page and allow that to fix the book layout. We’ll see how it goes.

What I found interesting on finding these shots again was how the way I viewed Venice has evolved over the years. I mentioned at the start that I initially saw Venice as a “City of Glimpses” but when I went back to make more work in 2012 I was trying to express something different. At that time I saw Venice more as a set of interconnected events; relationships between a whole bunch of objects and happenings in a network across the city. And I see something of this idea in this set of images. At any given time boats are going under bridges in canals all over the city.

Early days. And it all started whn I found a packet of prints I had forgotten about. By pondering this process and experience  in public as the idea develops I hope to refine and finesse the idea into something more satisfying and cohesive than it would otherwise be. I hope people will chime in with their thoughts as the project develops. I plan to make some follow-ups along the way and thank you for reading.

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