The Integral Polaroids Of Jones Smith (#9).

The critic Jerry Kirshenbaum has stated, in a written paper published in The Journal of Contemporary Vernacular Photography (Volume three, issue one. June, 2006), that each 600 photograph depicted each door in Smith's house. This however is pure conjecture and no evidence – beyond the fact that there are indeed ten doors in total in Jones Smith’s house – has been presented. On the ground floor there exists the front door (leading into the hallway), door to lounge (off the hallway), door to dining-room (off the hallway) door to kitchen (off the hallway), back door (leading to a small enclosed yard). On the first floor, off the hallway there are doors to bedroom one, bedroom two, bedroom three (converted into a study), and the combined toilet and bathroom (at the end of the hallway).

That two previous photographs, 080541627-02 1711 9276 and 080541627-02 1711 9277, depict his front door does not in itself indicate a wider theme, as Kirshenbaum would have us believe. This, however, has not failed to stop other scholars from agreeing with Kirshenbaum’s' hypothesis.

Lewis P. Bohler, in an essay published in The Jones Smith Journal (Volume one, issue one. Sepember, 2006. p9-12) on the relationship between the two aforementioned integral Polaroid photographs, the 600 type integral Polaroid photographs, Charles Tomlinson's poem The Door (which ends: "For doors / are both frame and monument / to our spent time, / and too little / has been said / of our coming through and leaving them.") and Berlin Uscar’s poem The Door Revealed' (which ends: "and the door / was opened / open / and I saw the face of all) is one such example.

or Nancy Jalet  - whom I otherwise hold in high regard – from submitting a paper at conference in Newport, Wales (Reclaiming the feminine: The 600 type Polaroids of Jones Smith. January 2007) with the view that it was in fact other doors within the home: kitchen cupboards, wardrobes, fridge, etc, that were photographed - a hypothesis from which forgeries derive (the forgeries came to light only recently and were published in the second issue of The Jones Smith Journal, March 2007).

The reason for the abandonment of 600 type film – let's not forget after a single evening - is unknown.

Reclaiming the feminine: The 600 type Polaroids of Jones Smith