Why my vintage SX-70 Polaroids are the real keepers

It was back in the mid-1980s that I first saw Polaroid SX-70 manipulations. They were created by exposing an image onto Polaroid's Time Zero film via their SX-70 or a 600 series cameras. A Daylab slide printer or even an enlarger could be used as well. After the image developed, the film emulsion remained pliable for about an hour or so. During that time the film's emulsion could be hand-manipulated by using different tools, such as crochet hooks, wooden ceramic tools, burnishing tools, pens, etc. In effect you were gently 'pushing' the dyes around right on the film. It was also very easy to 'overcook' the image - resulting in a scrambled mess. The 'successful ones' though seemingly blurred the lines between photography and painting with an end result of a bonafied 'one-off, one-of-a-kind original'.

Around the same time, artist David Hockney also started creating (non-altered) Polaroid collages within a grid format that he called 'joiners. His work, on top of the altered ones I'd first seen made my head explode! Are they my best photographs? Probably not, but they're the ones I'd certainly grab if the house was threatened. During that time I was also playing with the professional Polaroid sheet films I used with a 4 x 5 view camera. They were amazing, but the consumer film for the SX-70 was a spectacular film in its own right. Remarkably sharp with exceptional color saturation, especially considering it was a massed produced consumer product.

Note: The original Polaroid films were discontinued in 2005 and attempts at duplicating the consumer films still haven't come close to the original films created by the legendary Edwin Land. I was first shown the technique by my earliest photography mentor, Stephen Francis - an exceptional professional and fine art photographer that I worked with in my early days of my advertising design career.


After producing several manipulated single 'one-offs', I became a little more adverturesome and precise by incorporating Hockney's 'grid technique'. By shooting with a tripod and using a SX-70 shutter release cable to eliminate any vibration, I could up the anty on the sharpness. The results of these efforts were my own take on SX-70 collage constructions. 8 or 9 grouped polaroids carefully cropped in the camera by systematically moving the tripod position. This could produce an organized arrangement of the subject scene.To get those 8 or 9 usable final images to align would entail shooting (at least) 20 or so polaroids. The process required some serious multi-tasking, working both on the 'altering aspect' (as the Polaroids were ejected from the camera) and producing the next frame of the overall scene.

All the altered SX-70 Polaroids shown here were completed within a few years between 1986-1989. I wished I had embraced the technique further but a physical move from Southern California to Northern California combined with starting a new businesss pushed me towards a little more conventional directions, photography-wise. Forty plus years later, the seventy or so surviving images have been stored properly and the dyes and film have held up beautifully (from an archival point-of-view).

A sampling below of a few Polaroid professional films I used along the way via a Deardorf 4x5 View Camera. My experience with that 'wooden beast' was short lived once I purchased my first Nikon 35mm camera.