Video: a Polaroid pilgrimage

By Rich-Joseph Facun

IT WAS THE FALL OF 1999, and I was packing my things for college, where I was going to study photojournalism. I opened the coat closet and there it was, dangling from a hanger next to a checkerboard sweater reserved for the family dog: my mother’s old Polaroid camera.

She got the camera in the mid-1980s, and we took pictures of everything with it. I remember a photo I snapped back in the ’80s of my older sister sitting in her bedroom. Her hair was swept up into a wave and loaded with hairspray; through the ’do, you could see her oversized silver hoop earrings. In the background, there was a Duran Duran poster that clashed with her lavender bedposts.

But now the camera was just hanging there in our Virginia Beach home, not being used anymore, so I grabbed it. I figured it might come in handy . My family didn’t even know I took it.

Mom’s Polaroid has been with me ever since. I’ve used it to capture abandoned gas stations, empty swimming pools and anything else that caught my eye.

On many of the trips back and forth from college in Ohio, I shot Polaroids of landscapes seen through my van window while crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It wasn’t as clunky as my Nikons, so I could hold it in one hand and drive with the other.

I eventually wound up in Chicago and used the Polaroid on my first date with the woman I later married. I brought the camera along thinking it could be an icebreaker. She and I had both recently moved to the city, and I thought we could snap pictures of our new town. She could go home with a souvenir that might keep me fresh in her mind . I could go home with a photograph of my new crush. I ended up writing a poem on the bottom of the picture she took of me. The instant-film magic must have worked.

Two years ago my wife and I brought the camera with us when we settled down back here in Hampton Roads.

When I heard the news earlier this year that Polaroid was ending the production of instant film by the end of 2008, I felt a dash of remorse. The company that introduced the technology in 1948 has had financial troubles for years and went bankrupt in 2001.

I felt guilty for not shooting more Polaroids while I had the chance. I went over to my bookshelf, dug out my mom’s camera, blew the dust off and decided to give it one more go.

It seemed fitting to use it for a documentary, revisiting the local places I remember from childhood.