Working the Angles.

Instant film, sideways and straight-on.

There is nothing more exciting to me than waking up early and loading up my camera bag plus a sack of film to head out on the road. For a normal daytrip I carry two to four packs of color SX-70 plus a couple packs of b&w, and roughly the same load out for the 600.

Lincoln County, Miss., 2020 (Polaroid 600). If you don’t carry two different vintage cameras and a hundred dollars’ worth of film, how can you even begin to make a photo of a giant inflatable fireworks gorilla?!

I certainly use the SX-70 more heavily than I did in the past—it’s a single lens reflex, so you can actually see what you’re shooting, and importantly, focus it. The 600 is purely range-finder, you can look through the window (I do, more or less) and get what the camera gives you. It’s the camera I began shooting with roughly 20 years ago—well, the same rough type that uses the same film, because I’ve actually worn out the motors on the old things after a while. I’ve gone out before with just a 600 to try to make sure I could still feel my way around the world instead of depending on the knowledge of what I could get from the SX-70.

Rienzi, Miss., 2019 (Polaroid 600)

So with the 600 I’ll cheat the angles—I’m not great at guessing where the thing’s actual center is (I have friends who are, which blows my mind), so I shoot on the diagonal. This often seems more like natural “looking” in photographs, less than the stiffer and more precise composition I fall into when employing the SX-70. We’re rarely staring straight at an object or scene—normally looking up or down at it from where we’re standing, not moving to create a composition of the object or scene, as with a painting.

Once you see this it’s hard to unsee—but look at the 4-way stop above in Alcorn County, then:

Lake Providence, Louisiana (Polaroid 600)

Roughly the same angle and related composition, both in an attempt to bring the subject matter into roughly the center of the frame. It’s just a way of seeing the world—as one person said, democratically, but perhaps you could say naturally or chaotically—instead of bringing the world into order.

Look at this photograph by Wm. Eggleston, who often uses Leica and Canon rangefinders:

William Eggleston, Untitled ca. 1979

This has the actual look and feel of just walking down that little dirt road to whatever comes next—this feels like what life looks like to me. It’s also incredibly gorgeous—has a dirt road ever looked more beautiful? Is the tree is pretty as its shadow? Don’t you love the gradient of the sky?

Compare with his old friend William Christenberry, who not only trained as a painter, but also flourished as a precise sculptor and creator of architectural objects:

William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, 1984

The image is taken straight ahead—part of a composed whole. It’s beautiful in its geometry, the Christmas colors, the lush world. This is also what life looks like, but with a more controlled, yet serene approach—minus the unsettled angles of the nomad.

(This is the point where I note that some of Mr. Christenberry’s painterly compositions were done not with large format or 35mm, but with a Brownie. How he did that I have no idea, but they’re wonderful).

When I was really hardcore, I’d carry two SX-70s, one loaded with b&w and one with color—both to preempt the fluky nature of the then-much flukier color film, and also to try to get it down on film just how I saw it in real life. And there are times when it looks truer to real life when it’s in black & white.

Somewhere in the Mississippi Delta in Winter, 2019 (Polaroid SX-70)

I remember this foggy, cold, rainy morning well—I had spent the night in Greenville, trying in vain to find something, anything for a picture. I never found it, but on the way back home to Jackson in the morning, the world looked like this. In my memory it’s actually black & white, and maybe in real life it was, too.

Haven’t you been on that road before, the black & white one, late at night, or early in the morning?

YES, LIKE YOU, I also hate Instagram’s new layout, which seems designed to trick people into using products or services like Reels and shopping instead of, you know, posting photos and stories . . . my two Sunday morning albums are Allen Toussaint’s Southern Nights and John Cale’s Paris 1919, please send me yours . . . the Alabama - LSU game was canceled, so I drove around Copiah County and photographed a church called Redbone . . . on Friday the 13th I watched the ‘63 movie version of The Haunting of Hill House, called just The Haunting, and it scared the beejesus out of me . . . this week I also watched A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (possibly the best title of all time), and while I found it frustrating in part, the beautiful, tranquil nature of the middle part conjoined with the obliteration of the third act’s black metal performance has ricocheted around in my head for days . . .

AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids. I leave you with this photo by the old man himself of his converted briefcase (!) of rangefinders he hauls out when shooting: