As you know, recently I have been going around the urban landscape in London and taking photographs, which I generally do on my own. So I decided to be part of a group for a workshop and to do something different, staying well clear of digital photography for a day, to take photos with a Polaroid. I have never used this type of camera before and I was aware they used to be seen in the past as a fun, playful way of taking photos. Dan told us to roam the streets of Central London and take photos of anything we found interesting, whether people, buildings or whatever. I took photos both in black and white and in colour and like Wim Wenders I was trying to warm up my polaroids, not under my arm pits as this would have proven difficult under layers of clothing but inside my pockets!
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| Photo by Mirta Imperatori |
I wandered around the streets of London with an old fashioned large Polaroid camera around my neck asking strangers to be photographed, a dazzling experience. I got some people who really enjoyed being photographed with an old camera and others who didn't want to be pictured at all (which was actually quite funny in some cases because they were being filmed by CCTV cameras, at least four of them, and this would provide much more detail than my old polaroid camera would). This made me ponder about how people are fed up with being filmed and photographed in our digital age, which is fair enough, but we can't escape CCTV cameras in central London now. I used two different types of Polaroids to take the photos in the street. Dan Roubin loved my black and white photographs, particularly one street scene that he said was amazing. He thought this photograph looked like it could have been taken 100 years ago, it doesn't look like central London at all, which is very busy and generally full of people; it's got an air of mystery, see pic. below.
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| Photo by Mirta Imperatori |
He also liked very much my colour photographs done with another Polaroid, which have softer mellow colours. I took photos, portraits of people and strangers in the street, see pic. below, within a given time constraint.
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| Photo by Mirta ImperatoriAdd caption |
I had several people coming up to me asking about my cameras, so the old fashioned cameras prompted a dialogue. I got one guy asking me for my number that made me laugh because it was so not London where people don't usually communicate, they prefer to shut down because it's so busy. And it seemed none of the other members of the group had as many people coming up to them. All our photographs look very different from each other, some took photos of people from a distance, some took close ups, others concentrated on the buildings, the architecture. I enjoyed manually changing films in the street. It was an enjoyable workshop with a leader in his field.
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