Last spring I visited The Strand, and in hurriedly viewing the art books while my friends waited for me outside, I came across a collection of polaroids by Mike Slack. In some ways maybe there’s nothing much special going on in Slack’s work — but it’s exactly this, his simple rendering of these objects, horizons, pavement surfaces, and how the images come together like calmly interlocked fingers — well, it may seem overdoing it do call them devestatingly good, but that’s my reaction to the uncomplicated depicted with such respect. The polaroid imperfections, particularly an occasional bias towards yellow, magenta, or cyan, lend a specific, haunted texture; there’s an immutable silence to these cut-out, navel-gazed locations.
In an interview, Slack described his preference for the polaroid camera as such: “It’s portable and uncomplicated. I can make images quickly and easily. The feedback is immediate. I also like the fixed size of the images (3″x3″) and the fact that there’s no negative to print multiples from – you get one positive image and that’s it. You can’t reproduce the thing. In that sense, there’s an existential purity (or something like that) to Polaroids that you don’t find in other types of photography. This is an important part of it for me – the camera as existential device, a way to really zero in on the present moment. It’s also a challenge to make really thoughtful, precise images in a medium normally considered cheap, disposable and lo-fi.”
“I get into this headspace sometimes when even the most familiar, mundane objects seem utterly profound, and I think my best pictures capture that weird profoundness. It’s almost like the camera has taught me how to look at things in this way… In a broader sense, I think the Polaroid camera and self-developing film were in fact originally conceived and designed to give non-photographers a means of engaging photographically with the world, which is very interesting to me. It provides a way of seeing things, documenting your waking life.”
