Instants
Collaging has always been a passion of mine. I started early with clippings from magazines and online printouts. I arranged the scraps together with intrinsic care before gluing them down. I always loved arranging everything on the page before committing to securing it. There was never a wrong answer – there were a million ways to do it. The act of putting things together always came easily to me. I just assumed that everyone could do it. Soon, my collages graduated into scrapbooks – a practice that I continue to this day. My love of collaging and collecting memories has never ceased.
Instant cameras pre-date me. I only became aware of their existence (and coolness) when Urban Outfitters decided to start selling modern (cheap and colorful) Instax cameras. These cameras became the must have accessory for millennials so, I had to jump on the bandwagon. I snagged a baby pink Instax 90 camera and an inordinate amount of film from my neighborhood Urban, and I was ready to start capturing EVERYTHING with Instax.
I began using the Instax camera to chronicle mine and my long-time boyfriend’s adventures. I captured us 4-wheeling in Nicaragua, surfing in Costa Rica, sipping red wine in Italy, and drawing tattoos on each other in Mexico. Some photos turned out wonderfully. The lighting was perfect, the composition was amazing and best of all the subject looked candid and effortless. But with the good comes the bad. Some instant images come out horrifically. The lighting was blinding or non-existent, the subject looked confused or was mid-facial expression. Worst case scenario – the camera eschews the subject entirely and your left with a speckled blob of nothingness. I have taken hundreds, if not thousands of these photos and I can tell you with certainty that a great photo is not guaranteed.
The fun of it is – that it doesn’t matter.
It is almost more fun when what you thought was going to be a great photo ends up being a blob of unintelligible nothing. There’s a story attached and these types of memories don’t easily get erased.
It is easy to forget how fleeting digital photos can be. If you feel unattractive, or don’t like the way you positioned your subject – you can simply delete the image. The photo may hang out in your recently deleted folder for 30 days but, after that it is gone. You may never remember that one bad photo where your gut is sticking out or the disproportionate representation you shot of the tower of Pisa, and maybe you don’t want to.
Although, there is something to be said for remembering life’s not so glamourous moments. I have a box filled with unworthy instant images that didn’t make the scrapbook cut. These are a few examples of photo opportunities that my boyfriend found humorous, (me on the eco-friendly toilet in Nicaragua, me peeing in the woods during a road-trip, me lying on top of a suitcase that wouldn’t close in London) the list goes on. I posses each of these terrible photos not because I like them but because, there are hilarious memories attached. These photos may never make it into a scrapbook, but they are always good for a laugh. Bad instants bring us a completely different kind of joy and help us remember little moments in our life that we may have forgotten. I cherish every photo that I have taken with my cheap little Instax and I look forward to taking a million more. We are unable to judge the importance of something in the moment. These kinds of realizations only come with time. I learned to cherish my ugly polaroid photos even when I really wished I could delete the evidence of me on the Nicaraguan eco-toilet.