Polaroid Experimentation

After researching Nicola Muirhead's 'Unseen/COVID 19' Polaroid project, I was inspired to have a go at some of the techniques myself. I picked up a Polaroid camera and some colour 600 film to play with.

I used the first 8-pack of film to take some shots around Canterbury with my friend Alex, just to see how it works and get used to the way it shoots, then when I got home I started to play with bleaching them. Here are all the shots I got that day (the last one came out blank because I took the film cartridge out too early)

The photos have a light pink hue, and are all a little overexposed, which I think is due to the film being a little old. These shots were good to get used to the camera and learn how it shoots, but overall aren't amazing photos. I took the blank film and the shot of the door and put thick household bleach on them with an old paintbrush, but nothing really happened, so I left them overnight.

There were only subtle changes on the blank Polaroid, so went back in with bleach, but I put it on the back of the film instead. This also didn't do anything, so I looked back at my notes on Muirhead's project and realised that she washed the Polaroids before bleaching them, and she did this right after taking the photos. The Polaroids I have are already a day old, but I washed and rebleached them anyway. Again, nothing happened, so I'm going to reload the camera and try again with my new knowledge. I also want to try different solutions to see how they work, so I might try to take the same photo lots of times so it's easy to see how each product affects the film.

I took 5 photos of my flatmate, one for each chemical/solution I wanted to use. I rinsed each Polaroid under warm water before getting my materials ready.

I brushed on an even coating to the back of each Polaroid and let them sit for a few minutes. Then, I rinsed them again with warm water and I used the paintbrush to remove any residue. There weren't really any changes, although I did notice some of the black had come off on the Polaroid with thick bleach, and some white powder appeared from under the white border on a few of them.

I then reapplied the same chemicals to the corresponding Polaroid, and left them for an hour while I had a 1:1 with Maddy, where she informed me that I was using the wrong film for this process, and Nicola Muirhead used a different type. However, she recommended that I try emulsion lifts. I have attempted them before with Instax film, which doesn't work, but it means I'm familiar with the process. The documentation of that is here.