Polaroids, 1996

"A friend of mine gave me an SX-70, the friend was Henry Jones, from Bethlehem. One day, he gave me this SX-70 camera, it's a Polaroid camera that kind of spits out a film from the front. It takes about a 2 ½ x 2 ½ picture. The film is called Time Zero film and it has a plastic coating on the front and back. The emulsion is trapped between the front and the back. I read somewhere that you can move this emulsion around with a sharpened stick or some pointed object, as long as it didn't rip the plastic, and you can move it around. I was able to secure some out-dated film and I started to manipulate this and move it around. I thought it had possibilities and later on, I was able to purchase a good film. Through manipulating this emulsion, I have transformed a realistic image almost to an impressionistic type of a painting-type of a photograph. Most people think that I have copied old photographs when I show them to them and I said, "No, these aren't copies of paintings, these are actual photographs," and I explain how I manipulate. Sometimes I will start moving the emulsion around, right after the exposure. Other times, I'll wait maybe a half a day or a day and I get different effects each day. I send them to Bill Johnson, who is the editor of Camera Techniques."

[Actually, the citation for the publication of two Polaroid shots by George Harvan is: Photo Techniques, 20:3 (May-June 1999), p. 19.]