A while back I was inspired by a good friend and amazing photographer Steph Larson and her 365 Days of Polaroid project. Although it may be immediately obvious, the idea is to take one polaroid every day for an entire year. Her project blew me away; it was done pre-pandemic and was truly incredible to see an entire year on display. I think I spent about two hours looking through the Polaroids over and over, each time walking away with something new. It felt like a very honest approach to documenting life just as it is. It really moved me and I've wanted to start my own ever since. 2020 wasn't the year for it, and although I'm not sure how much better 2021 will actually be, I figured the best time to start is now.
I'm approaching my project in a few different ways. First, I began posting them to my personal Instagram account daily with accompanying captions. It'll be interesting to look back and perhaps attribute some of those captions to the pieces in the final project. I also decided that I'd like to post a recap of each month as the series progresses with my general feedback/anecdotes. Another thing I chose early on was to not limit myself to just one Polaroid a day and allow for additional photos, so I'll also be sharing the "outtakes;" or the ones that weren't chosen. Lastly, after noticing how the camera exposes color in varying temperatures (it exposes very green in cold temps and very red in warm temps), I decided to create an overall color palette for each month.
So without further adieu, here is my Year in Polaroid:
January
For the first couple of weeks, I struggled to feel confident in this project. A lot of the photo work that I do is very much planned in advance and photographed with precision and attention to detail. I've never been great with instant cameras so I thought this project would be good practice for me to loosen up and get more comfortable with candidness. This first month overall feels much more thought out than I'd like the series to be, but I think it's just because it's new.
I found it difficult to toe the line between taking photos I would be proud of and letting them just exist as they are. Only taking one photo per day was giving me a bit of anxiety, so I gave myself room for error and opened it up to take as many as I'd like. I didn't want to be too rigid and only photograph for the project - there's merit to taking the photos I'd like to have for myself and going from there. I get more Polaroids to look back on, and it feels more personal to allow myself to be open with it.
It feels as though I'm beginning to hit my stride with the project and getting used to the technical aspects of shooting with a Polaroid. Analog is tricky for me because many of the techniques I shoot with do not translate. I like to shoot at lower exposures and enhance in editing - and boy did I learn fast how unfriendly the Polaroid is to low light exposures. I'm a little ashamed to admit how much film I've completely wasted with bad exposures. I also like to shoot wide and crop in post. Framing the shots properly is still something I trip up on, but this project is forcing me to be more intentional with my framing which is a great takeaway.
Color Palette
Outtakes
These are the ones that didn't make the cut for January. Now that I look back I'm not fully sure why I didn't end up choosing some, as I prefer them over what I ended up with. It's interesting to see where my points of insecurity are around the project. I've had this thought lingering in the back of my head that people will be looking at these eventually - so what did I want them to see? I think I over-curated and glossed over some great photos/moments.
February
February, for all intents and purposes, was a much more wild month than I anticipated. Things are starting to pick up again as the days get longer and life slowly starts to open back up. Now that I've settled into the project I feel less like I'm curating and much more fluid and honest. I'm shooting less and enjoying the process more with less anxiety and scrutiny to "get it right." I'm beginning to look at it with a sense of fondness over my days vs an assignment I need to complete.
One thing I wasn't anticipating was incorporating partial nudity in the series. It's not something I've ever really done with my work and to be honest, was a complete accident as the Polaroid shoots wider than what you see in the viewfinder, so clearly I'm still locking down framing. I feel a ping of discomfort when I think of these photos in the final part of this series on display and have gone back and forth about whether or not I want to include them or censor them. For now, the series is just for me and I'm trying to keep photographing through that lens. It is real and unfiltered and I have no idea what my feelings will be a year from now.
Color Palette
Outtakes
There were too many good Polaroids to choose from this month and I truly cherish all that made it into the series along with the outtakes. February has shaped up aesthetically to match the vision I had in my head for this series.
March
It's amazing how much more I enjoy shooting this series when life opens up a little. I feel like I'm in more of a place where I can just roll with it and not worry about how the project is coming together. Feeling that way and looking back on the month makes me a little more fond of it. Less curated, more lived.
Color Palette
Outtakes
April
Something I didn't expect to take away from this is that when life is busy and time feels like it has never mattered less, this project has actually kept me grounded in a way. I like to be occupied, and in staying busy I tend to forget a lot of the things I've done. It's one of the reasons I started this series - over the last few years I've developed a sense of dread that when I get older I won't have any photos to look back on. Capturing a little something every day, even if it seems insignificant, gives all those moments a little more purpose.
Color Palette
OUTTAKES
This month was filled with times where we did what we needed to do to pull ourselves out of a particularly dreadful, seemingly endless covid winter. Vaccines have become available to the general public and life has started to feel somewhat "normal" again.
May
Something I learned this month is how differently a Polaroid's color varies depending on outside temperature. Taking a trip to Florida was the first time I got to shoot with it in warm weather, and it's wild to me how much more red the camera exposes in higher temps. There's so much more life in them! It's made me very excited for the series in the summer months. With the camera being so poor in low light, and with the cold, it's been tough for me to get a lot of variation in the photos. I think I'll have a lot more room to be creative in the summer.
Color Palette
Outtakes
June
This month was my first attempt at getting a little more experimental with the project by trying different types of film. In theory, I really enjoyed the aesthetic of the black and yellow duochrome, but found it was actually very challenging to shoot with and properly expose. I LOVED the circular frames - they've been so fun to shoot with and have been a great way for me to get a little more creative with my shots. I continue to struggle with taking photos in a candid way. It's a little hard to be subtle with this giant hunk of noisy plastic, but I think I'm getting more comfortable with capturing moments without permission, per se.
Color Palette
Outtakes
July
Aesthetically I really like this month as it looks as non-stop as it felt. Shooting exclusively with the circular and duochrome film definitely sets this month apart. I'm a bit hyper-aware of how many portraits I'm shooting, but because the camera is so limiting I've found myself in this pattern of only really shooting what I know it can expose. In an effort to not waste money/film I've gotten a lot less experimental with the series.
Color Palette
Outtakes
August
I've really tried to stray away from the amount of posed portraits I've been taking. When shooting it all from my perspective, the subject matter can feel repetitive. So I've been handing the camera off to other people - and through that, I've learned a little bit about different ways to shoot that I wasn't thinking of. Something that makes this project different than most of my other projects is that it is not very collaborative. I'm used to working with a team of other photographers, stylists, art directors, etc, and getting creative input and feedback from many sources. Relying on only myself has really shown me what I gravitate towards the most, and ways I can break out of that. I also played a role in a short film during this month, and being on a film set was a great experience. I miss being inspired by others' creative energy.
Color Palette
Outtakes
September
Powering through the end of summer here. I don't think I really learned much or gained anything from the project this month. After 9 months of this, it's starting to feel like I'm going through the motions a bit. That being said, there are some Polaroids in this month that are some of my absolute favorites.
Color Palette
Outtakes
October
Definitely starting to feel burnt out with this series. I'm starting to miss days and become a lot less motivated to try new things. We are also aesthetically returning to darkness as the days grow shorter and colder and most of my Polaroids will be taken inside from here on out. It has been tough to be creative with the camera in these constraints, so I'm curious to see how the last couple of months turn out.
Color Palette
Outtakes
Most of my outtakes at this point are just additional photos from nights out. I do love how this camera captures this type of setting. A lot of these photos are my favorites to look back on and I'm glad I shot them with the Polaroid instead of my phone.
November
November was unexpectedly way harder of a month than I anticipated. I've been feeling very burnt out in general with work and the end of summer, and in a sense trying to cram everything in before winter hits. I hadn't taken any time off for myself in a while and was finally looking forward to about a week off to get out of the city and also travel to London for my uncle's wedding. While in London I ended up testing positive for COVID, which turned my 4-day trip into a 14-day trip. Being stuck in a room for 12 days and trying to still be creative with this project was a nightmare. I did what I could but it is clear that this month I truly didn't have much to give. Most of the exposures are completely black, poorly exposed, blurry, etc. It's very interesting to see how directly my mental state contributed to the way the photos came out.
Color Palette
Outtakes
This is the only month where I did not take any extra photos. I barely made it through as it was.
December
December started with me coming out of my quarantine in London, and from there I flew almost directly to Los Angeles for work for another 4 days away. Needless to say, I was completely burnt out, extremely homesick, isolated, and kind of just done with it. Getting my footing coming back home took basically the rest of the month, and I guess you could say I ended things feeling decent. I am very happy to be done with this project and also proud that I did it!
Color Palette
Outtakes
Reflections
This project has surprised me in many ways. It was hard for me at times to grasp how I would feel about it as a whole, but now that it is completely behind me, my feelings have become much more complex than I thought. Which I guess you could say is normal when working on anything for a year. I thought it would be interesting to document how I felt about the project as I was moving through it and I'm glad I did. Something I tend to do is generalize my feelings on things, focusing on the overall experience and not necessarily all the parts that make it up. For this project there really was no "this was good, and this was bad" as it all changed so much over time, which became clear to me looking back on all my notes. There are things that I took away that were not a surprise to me at all - like realizing that my style truly isn't very candid, and that's okay. And that putting pressure on myself to make it something that wasn't genuine to me defeated the purpose of the project in the first place. Other things, I truly could not have anticipated like ultimately feeling a little indifferent about the project. I thought after a year of doing this, I would have walked away feeling like I learned something major. Or that it would have changed my photography. It turns out I kinda feel the same as I did when I started, and while I have become much more comfortable documenting my life I don't really think it's going to influence any drastic change, which is also fine. Not every project is a milestone.
One of the most interesting parts about the series to me is the timing of it all. When I learned about this project through Steph, it was pre-covid. Life was still "normal." I wanted to do the project in 2020 but for some reason, I held off - and I'm SO glad I did because it would have been a very sad, boring series. We had no way of anticipating what 2021 was going to be like, but at the very least there was a glimmer of hope that life would be opening back up again, and documenting that year (especially following my covid series from 2020) made a lot of sense to me. It felt exciting and was an easy project to achieve when motivation was scarce. We took a lot of things for granted in 2020. It felt good to find a moment in each day, even if it was tough to feel great about it at times.
Photographically speaking, I've become much better at framing in-camera and that feels like a win. I also learned that long-form projects are challenging for me. I feel most inspired by new and frequently changing ideas - so being tied to this project for a year even though it was "easy" took away a lot of my motivation to work on other projects. I felt very dull and stale and bored with it in the last couple of months and was ready to move on. I'm definitely happy that I stuck with it, and honestly, since completing it I've had a sort of rush of creativity to start some new work, which has been refreshing.
Lastly, I have learned to have a greater appreciation of the more minute aspects of life through this series. We all know that 2020 was a year filled with seemingly endless bouts of nothing but time to self-reflect. I think I made a lot of important discoveries and strides in my personal growth in that year, and 2021 ended up being the year to implement those discoveries and settle in. For better or worse, this series painted a very detailed self portrait. To be quite honest (despite how difficult the last two years have been at times) for the most part, I have felt very comfortable and secure in myself. In a way, this Polaroid series kind of helped better define that for me. I've grown a much more solid foundation of self-love that I can see and feel and hold in my hands when I look at this series. It was a beautiful year.