There are many reasons why you might not have made a good photograph of a place. Maybe it’s because you’ve only been there once, and it was late afternoon and the light was white hot, or you need to walk it to soak in the details, or you were exhausted from a day of driving and were only thinking about whether there’s a Waffle House up the road. I promise you, there’s a way to find something beautiful there.
An old friend in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2021)
Well, maybe. I’ve made Polaroids in all sorts of places, of all sorts of things, and over twenty years of doing so have created a steadily growing archive of photos of certain places. Even the ones that didn’t do what I wanted them to have begun to accrue meaning, or perhaps their mystery resonates more now.
Sometimes the attraction is that I do know the place, like the handpainted vCrs / tVs up above. Yazoo City is just up the road from me, but looks much different than Jackson. Sometimes I just go up there for a drive or to test a new camera, and I’ve found light really alters the look of the narrow canyons of its downtown. I’ve made photos of that particular window front with everything from a Land Camera to even a Big Shot. So I think the challenge is to begin to try to frame it differently—like this “reverse Main Street” from the storefront across the street from the old furniture store.
Yazoo, again in 2021 with the SX-70
But I feel like some places need time to understand. For a native Southerner like myself, I think the challenge with New York City is not the lack of subject matter—it’s the abundance of it. I have more Polaroids of storewindows in Yazoo City than I do of the Empire State Building (I only have 2 of those). Because I know how to shoot a storefront in Yazoo City, but I have no idea how to make a photo of the Empire State Building.1
So I had to learn patience in a place like NYC.
Brooklyn, Polaroid Land Camera with Fuji FP3000b (2015)
Also I think the older I get the more my antenna works. After years of listening to the world around me, I feel more sensitive to what is going on, perhaps I can see a little bit better.2
While some places need more time to understand, some are very upfront. Earlier this year when I traveled to California, I got off the plane in Palm Springs, hopped into a Jeep, then drove an hour and immediately stumbled into this situation:
Twentynine Palms, Calif., Polaroid SX-70 (2021)
I mean come on. And this wasn’t even the first photo I made in that first hour! It was, like, the tenth.
There’s also those photos you find while looking for something else. When I was exploring Leflore County, looking as many have before me for Robert Johnson, I found this loving memorial in Little Zion Cemetery:
Outside Greenwood, Miss., Polaroid SX-70 (2021)
All this brings us to the place I have tried to shoot for many moons and never managed to get on film. I had never made one notable photograph of Philadelphia, Mississippi —not at the casino, not downtown, not in Neshoba itself. For a while I tried to just do landscapes there; I once spent an afternoon, heartsick and in the rain, trying to create something to honor three people who were murdered there during Freedom Summer, a critical project in 1964 to bring national awareness to the revolutionary attempt by Black Mississippians to seize the right to vote. I never even pressed the shutter closed.
Yet after the solitude of the past year, I tried to open my eyes again to the world. I have to sometimes remind folks who are also shooting notoriously tricky and fickle instant film that this newsletter is the result of literal years spent traveling and looking. It’s those years plus thousands of dollars of film, worn out motors on 50 year old cameras, overexposures, underexposures, blurry images, badly framed subjects, weirdly framed subjects—hundreds of misses and near-misses. This is the best I could do, and certainly not automatic. So I have to keep trying.
So a few weeks ago I load up to head to Philadelphia, and—
Neshoba County, Miss., Polaroid 600 (2021)
Yes, a rusted car! A rusted Ford with some WEEDS GROWING UP AROUND IT, that is my jam. And the colors actually turned out, I am a GENIUS. (Or, I’m a hack.) WAIT AM I A HACK?? Dear lord but it was a lot of work and literal years of my life just to make a photo of a rusted car with weeds growing up around it!3
I guess that’s the point. I still have a lot of work to put in. And a lot more visits and trips to . . . everywhere. So I hope on this Sunday you keep driving, go to someplace you’ve never figured out before, and walk around and see what you can see in one of those gray zones.
Just know that I feel you that it’s not easy, that there’s days when you can’t seem to write anything that seems special, and can’t seem to make a photo you haven’t seen before. That’s okay, too. We have to believe it all adds up, that all this—that all this means something. I think it really does.
Well this is not really true. One, you shoot it as an allegedly innocuous background detail (how I did it in with a Land Camera during the day) and second, you run a long exposure at night and blur it so it evokes a legendary painting (which is how I did it with an Instax wide, which I really only shot with on that trip).
I am aware of ruthlessly mixing metaphors here between “cracking codes” and then “listening to signals”! I can’t help it, this is the struggle of attempting to articulate artistic method and perhaps even spiritual inspiration through the limited mode of human language! Sidebar if you’re reading this footnote I’m listening to Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood. Wait now I’m listening to TEARS by Hectorine. Both are beautiful Sunday morning records.
This is also after parking on the square, walking around for an hour, driving up and down through town and then the land of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, listening to country, listening to blues, trying to find the signal.