Stuart Mackenzie
Polaroids-revisited
Stuart Mackenzie
PhotoForum Member Portfolio, 2010
I originally exhibited some of these photographs during the mid-seventies in “Polaroids: A Group Show” at Snaps Gallery in Airedale St., Auckland. Owing to a technical fault in the manufacture of a large batch of SX-70 film many of my polaroids began to deteriorate a few months or years later. The main problem I encountered was a cracking or spider’s web effect under the plastic surface. Some prints were worse than others and unfortunately had to be discarded. I’ve scanned and cleaned the few remaining good ones at quite a high resolution so that they could be printed larger than the original size. With a lot of my work I try to capture a sense of mystery in the mundane which I think is evident in some of these images. I like to work in black & white as well as colour using film, super-8 and digital. The challenge is to convey the feeling from what I’m seeing within the constraints of a technical medium.