Judy McGuire. Polaroid: Amateur Porn of My Youth.
McGuire, Judy. Polaroid: Amateur Porn of My Youth. Seattle Weekly. 19/02/2008. Available online at: http://www.seattleweekly.com/2008-02-20/diversions/dirty-pictures/.
My first live-in boyfriend and I had quite the collection of homemade hard-core Polaroid porn. We were so young and cute back then...I still remember our breakup—both of us sitting at the kitchen table, solemnly slicing the photos into bits so that neither of us could use them for blackmail later on.
I'm also not embarrassed to admit that I've used the Polaroids as sort-of trophies: the first boy I got with after a long dry spell—snapped, so I could look back when I was feeling down and know it was possible for me to bag cute guys.
While these quotes are somewhat dated now, especially considering the imminent revival of what was previously thought impossible, what I find interesting is the way in which the physicality - and a permanence through durability - is indicated by 'slicing the photos into bits...'. Not mentioned explicitly here is the singularity of the medium: if this was analog film the post would need to discuss the location and destruction of the negative, and if the images were digital... imagine, a couple slumped over a computer screen going through the hard drive, flickr account, facebook page and deciding which images to delete - and hoping no-one has copied (and pasted) any of them!
The Polaroid as trophie is something that I have mentioned / quoted on before. The question that springs to mind here is how notions of the (photographic) trophie differs (if, indeed, it does) between the digital and the analog?




09 02 2010
