Polaroid, My Heart

by Cait

This is a love story; a lost story; a found story. This is how one really big thing changed my life, and how one really little thing changed it again. It starts, as many stories do, with a Seminal Event:

On August 8th, 2004, my husband was murdered.

I was thirty-two years old, and I began to be afraid. If my husband could be beaten to death in a park while out with friends, anything could happen and nothing was safe. But my biggest fear by far was that I would forget. Not the big things, but all those little moments that go toward the building of a life. I was the sole caretaker of a decade of memories. What if I lost them? What had I already forgotten?

When my mother gave me a Polaroid camera the following year, I had no idea how necessary to my life it would become. Suddenly I had this small thing, this tool that allowed me to capture, immediately and viscerally, anything I wanted to see again, keep forever, or never forget. I could carry it with me. It required no technical expertise. It produced something physical, and it could be secret or it could be shared; it could be placed in a box, hidden in a book, taped to a wall, left on a park bench, mailed across the country, given as a gift.

Polaroid is magic. Its imperfections are its virtues. Often slightly blurred, the colors are softened and shift in unexpected directions; the very structure of the print lending depth and luminosity to the images it produces. This is as close to making memory solid and tangible as anything I have ever known.

Polaroid is personal. It happens in your body and your hands, from eye to machine to finger, needing no external interference, no other intelligence.

Polaroid is unique. There will never be another image exactly like the one that just shot out of your camera and that developed as you watched. There are no reprints, only reproductions. This one is all you get; good or bad, perfect or (most likely) not. Like so many things in life, it is what you make of it.

As the years have passed and I have acquired more cameras, instant and conventional, it is the Polaroid that still speaks to me in a way no other camera can. Shooting with a Polaroid, using Polaroid film, is an experience that no other photographic process can replicate. Along with millions of others, I have discovered the most amazing thing about Polaroid photography: it makes people happy. It makes me happy. And I know, that when memory begins to fail, I have a box of Polaroids waiting for me.