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| Thursday, October 09, 2008 |
| Gone in an Instant |
An icon is passing away. While I have become completely numb to the overwhelming news reports of climate change, political, and banking shenanigans, I am mourning the passing of a friend who helped me celebrate so many of the major, and plenty of the minor events in my life. It was someone I trusted completely. She was a faithful and honest companion. She never told a lie, not even to spare your feelings.
Like a baby sister, I remember the first time I was allowed to hold her carefully in my hands. I had to be very responsible, and follow all the grow-ups instructions to be allowed this privilege. She was with us forever after that, and she grew up with us. She was there to capture me as an 8 year old with an awful haircut and the worlds’ biggest grin, in black and white. She was there for my first prom, as my grandparents posed so proudly with me in a turquoise and white gown and my first grown-up hair-do. She captured me sleeping in bed with my week old son, as my husband left for work, needing a souvenir to take with him.
She came to work with me, after the kids grew up and left home. For the next 15 years, birthdays, holidays, silly celebrations, and visitors were recorded and thumb tacked in place on a wall we are all drawn too when we remember life’s happy moments, or what our hair looked like in any given year.
I would sneak her home with me when I had business only she could be trusted to help me with. I would try on a bathing suit, and ask a stranger, or a salesperson to snap my picture. The unvarnished truth was there.
Periodically, she would get dropped, by someone who was no longer in awe of the magic she created. I would replace her with a smaller, newer, less shiny, cheaper edition, and hope she wasn’t insulted. I’d worry until the first new photo whirred out.
Like my fellow cave-dwellers, who include a diverse bunch like “artists and crime scene photographers,” I have knowledge of ‘truly’ instant, up to the moment inventions, some of which have passed like the fads they were, some that I understand will never go away. Only fellow Polaroid lovers understand the camera, and films’ ability to capture trends, images, “moods,” and life itself, the moment it was occurring, “in a look that is pretty much impossible to get any other way - no hardware or software can re-create it.” [1.] I’m glad you had such good friends. Goodbye! Thanks for the memories.
- Nancy
Related Article:
Polaroid will stop making its film
Labels: food for thought, Nancy
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posted by The Sensei Team @ Thursday, October 09, 2008   |
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