So, you have to make a course to teach students about all the creative fine art possibilities of various Polaroid films. Before it went under, Polaroid had some very cool films nobody else could match. One of those films was the popular Time-Zero film for the SX-70 camera. One photographer I knew of from the ‘80s who pretty much owned this Time-Zero Polaroid space was Michael Going, whose creative work with the medium became a signature look that became much sought after in commercial photography. Michael’s work was easy and fun to emulate. It involved using a special Polaroid SX-70 camera and shooting an image with the proprietary film which popped out of a slot in the camera, and slowly developed before your eyes. Michael discovered that while the image was slowly developing, that you could “mush” the soft emulsion and distort the image in a specific way. Using different kinds of tools, a ball stylus, butter knife, any number of like things could be used.
So in order to be thorough in teaching my class, I shot a sample using this technique. It’s fun and a way of creating unique one-off images. No two will ever be alike.