Mad Science

Tonight I decided that instead of taking a photo (yawwwwn) I’d get all Moholy-Nagy wid it and try and make a polaroid photogram. My camera’s just a box with a lens and a roller, so it couldn’t be too difficult, now could it?

My bathroom’s close to light-tight, so I went in there, removed the film pack from my camera, carefully slid an unexposed polaroid out, placed my hand over it where my fingers would cast half-interesting shadows, and turned on the light for a second. Then, in an attempt to approximate the effect of the camera’s rollers (when a polaroid is spit out, the camera squeezes it with rollers which break little chemical capsules in the polaroid and start the development process) I ran over it once with a rolling pin. You can see where this is going.

I seem to have smashed the poor thing, instead of developing it. It spit some white goo out the back, but other than that, not much happened.

Undaunted I tried again, twice, but replaced the rolling pin step with carefully reinserting the polaroid back into the film pack and letting the camera spit it out as usual. Those two attempts produced nothing at all. I’m going to need a lot of money and time before I can get this right. Maybe I can ask her, or him.