VII
This photo was obviously not taken by me. My friend Elise from Minneapolis did a print trade with me last year and we decided to do Polaroids. I sent her one of my cloud photos and she sent me this photograph of a maple tree. I love everything about the photo; the colors of the leaves, the tree “growing” out of the bottom corner and spreading through the frame and even the little fingerprint smudge from someone pressing on the photo before it was done developing. It’s a beautiful photograph in every way.
It was incredibly difficult to part with a Polaroid though. Sure it’s scanned but unlike digital files and film negative that you can make as many copies of as you please, there really is only one of any Polaroid that one creates. To give that singular image away to someone is not an easy thing to do. Elise and I actually talked about after we traded and we were both actually surprised that we even had the guys to trade them. Especially because all we knew was that we were getting a Polaroid from the other person; nothing about the content of the image. I’m incredibly happy with how the whole thing turned out though and we’re actually doing another one soon with darkroom prints just as soon as we both scrounge up the money for postage.
