The series by William Miller was selected by Daniel Aycock, Gallery Owner, Front Room Gallery, during portfolios reviews organized by The New York Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP NY) on February 18th, 2015, in New York.
William Miller is a veteran photojournalist and native New Yorker. Born in 1969 he studied photography at Bard College. His work has appeared in Saveur, Harpers, Paris Match, Spin, GQ, Stern, the New York Post, the Daily News, The Globe and Mail among others and his clients have included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Human Rights Watch, Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Borders and Sundance Channel.
His art photography has also been exhibited around the country and has been featured in the Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Lenscratch, Hyperallergic, Feature Shoot, El Pais and won the 2011 Celeste Prize for Photography.
Ruined Polaroids
These pictures are taken with a camera that is, by most definitions, broken: an old Polaroid SX-70 camera that I rescued from a yard sale. With its first use I realized the camera wasn’t functioning properly. It sometimes spills out 2 pictures at a time and the film often gets stuck in the gears, exposing and mangling them in unpredictable ways. I’ve figured out how to control and accentuate aspects of the camera’s flaws but the images themselves are always a surprise. Each one is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the film and the camera.
These pictures are taken with a camera that is, by most definitions, broken: an old Polaroid SX-70 camera that I rescued from a yard sale. With its first use I realized the camera wasn’t functioning properly. It sometimes spills out 2 pictures at a time and the film often gets stuck in the gears, exposing and mangling them in unpredictable ways. I’ve figured out how to control and accentuate aspects of the camera’s flaws but the images themselves are always a surprise. Each one is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the film and the camera.
Cheap and ubiquitous digital photography has long since replaced Polaroid film for conventional image making. In doing so it’s rendered the old technology antiquated and the object of nostalgia. What Ruined Polaroids offers is a picture of the Polaroid process itself frozen in time and plucked out of the camera mid-gesture.
