polaroids, rip

i've talked w/a lot of female friends who THANK GOD that the digital age started well after their days of wild oat sowing. on the other hand, i curse god & whoever else that this is the case. i mean, i'd have photographic documentation of even one-nighters, or so it seems. there are websites totally devoted to irate boyfriends posting pics of girlfriends who'd dumped them or cheated on them or just to show them off. & yeah, there are even posts from guys who'd just gotten lucky one night. those guys really want to share. i check these sites a lot. initially, it's mind-boggling that someone could be such a pig but then i think back to a few bad break-ups & then run those emotions through a booze-addled brain & think, well, i guess i see how it could happen. i can only imagine the fears ann marie, lynn, haller & all my female friends w/daughters must have.

i got to thinking about this after reading that kodak is dis-continuing their "instamatic" film for their polaroid cameras. the "model 95" camera was introduced nearly six decades ago "at a pricetag equivalent to some $850 today." their color version debuted in 1972 (junior year in high school!!!). i don't think the importance of these devices can be overstated. the erotic was taken out of the hands of the pros & given over to, well, anyone who could afford the camera.

i have to confess. people taking pics of their trips to cancun or machu picchu or where ever never made much sense to me. you can't remember it? why did you go somewhere you can't remember? family reunions? who the hell WANTS to remember those? but sex? even bad or grotesque or embarrassing or humbling sex? now that's something i want to remember. the erotic is different for us at different times (except perhaps for the deviant which is what precisely marks him as deviant). who knows how my memory will interact w/some old polaroid, what glory might be lurking there.


somewhere in tom mcguane's novel, panama, the main character has been spying on his stepmother, "until i saw things i shouldn't have" & he stops spying. that passage always amused me. i got caught spying on natalie & the shame of it stopped me dead in my tracks. but when it comes to family no amount of shame will stop whatever habits you've developed in regards to them. so going through my mother's drawers was just something i did habitually. the whole family did this to each other since there were no locks on any doors (excepting the bathrooms). there simply was no privacy in the jones family. so stumbling on the polaroids in mother's nightstand was just, what?, luck? i don't think so.


the odd thing about the polaroid shot was always the frame: those four white borders seemed to reduce size, block out context, freeze the size, contain the content. so seeing a cock in my mother's mouth was initially almost scientific in its affect. frozen like that & reduced to an object, the ACT becomes something that can be addressed from various points of view. of course, none of them included "WTF, THAT'S MOM!!!" i was in my 20s at this point & had had my cock sucked many times. i'd seen LOTS of porn. " i wonder," i kind of mused, "who that is? it's not bobo...no potgut...it's her bedroom, i'm sure of that...etc." actually, i never found out whose cock it was. i'm not sure that would have really mattered. what stays w/me more than anything is the imposition of the medium on the act.
that & the fact that she kept the polaroid. there it was in her drawer & now, in my hand. this little piece of homemade erotica. what was i to make of the fact that she chose to save it? that she could & would take it out & look at it, as i was looking at it, tho i supposed in a different way.

i had some polaroids until just recently. i still remember one of natalie, her incredible luscious womanly body, all soft curves even at that age. over the course of years, i'd looked at the pic...in g'ville, in virginia, in sf, at the institute. each time those curves seemed more distant, less visible. the last time i looked, there was no telling who it was & her body had become an almost abstract form lost in the reddish black background.




in "camera lucida," roland barthes' great contemplation of photography, one critic notes:

"Barthes sees Death implicit in each photograph. He is struck by how the photograph moves you back through time. How you always have the past with you. Each photo documents a 1/60, 1/ 125 of a second that existed. Death is the final moment of a life and the last possible photograph. At the same time, Barthes sees the photograph as a kind of resurrection. It continues after the person is gone. It has a life of its own, in scrapbooks, on walls, in cardboard boxes, as long as the paper exists. Barthes likes the fact that what he sees has existed in front of the lens. The past is as certain as the present."

it is no surprise that andy warhol understood what the polaroid meant. his sense of irony was god-like & it's really what defined him as an artist. each starlet wannabe's polaroid always already condemned them to exactly where they did not want to be & never thought they could be: the past. their instant celebrity made them an immediate memory.
walker evans the great modernist photographer worked almost exclusively w/polaroids in his later years. it was easier for him to handle than the bigger apparatuses he'd used in is youth & it was free. kodak gave away the cameras & the film to a few "big name" photographers. if you look at the photos in evans & agee's "let us now praise famous men," (shot earlier w/o polaroids) what strikes you is the timeless quality, the nearly monumental aspect of ephemeral, meaningless things & people. it's no real surprise he ended up where warhol began, where we all began really. w/polaroids, we could make the past "as certain as the present" quicker & make our present appear more immediate. more personal too since we could possess it (& hide it away in our bedside drawers). no wonder polaroids were so popular! they were truly magic.


that magic's all over now but ann marie, lynn, & haller can't sleep any easier. the new technologies are even more exact (perfect color!!!) & much more easily shared. 16yo girls are sending prospective boyfriends nude pics of themselves (this is more mind-boggling than the piggish boys posting the pics) like resumes. our intimacies are totally open to the public sphere & the possibility of infinite reproduction begs the question of value & meaning (warhol, again). & tho all my pics are just a computer glitch away from the all encompassing ether, i don't feel the anxiety of imminent loss.

i do mourn the loss of my polaroid of nat but that happened naturally w/the passing of time...like, well, the real thing. you know, like what happens to us all: death.