Listener comments
"Shake it - a modern Polaroid love story"
“I just listened to your Modern Polaroid Love Story piece and it was wonderful! Sounded beautiful, too. The music was outstanding! So glad you got that old Polaroid instructional; total time travel. Even went on eBay - like the guys in your story - to take a look at the old SX-70...”
"For Megan - who's putting pictures on the radio" -- Christopher Bonanos
“What a beautiful piece!!! It really moved me… Big time. My Dad was an amateur photographer and early tech geek and bought a Polaroid land camera in the early 60′s. I can remember as a little boy sitting on his lap watching the image materialize as he looked at his watch. Now I am in a relationship with a photographer, a pro, and we pretty much communicate by phone exchanging images.”
“Thanks for giving CBE such a great hour of awesome radio!”
“My dad had Polaroid pics. I’m pretty sure I only saw about half of them and I don’t want to think about the other half.”
“I am among the millions who really enjoyed your Polaroid piece. You’re probably hacking through all of the e-mail kudos right now. My brother – a photographer and painter would occasionally use Polaroids in one of the stages of his complex craft. He would shoot a Polaroid, re-photograph it in B&W, blow it up faded, then paint the developed picture, rendering photo-real paintings of still-lifes, portraits, and erotica. ”
“I remember parties which were recorded only and enthusiastically by Polaroid cameras with the whole breath-catching giggling ritual of snap, count, shake and watch your grinning self ooze out of the little box. I can even remember what I was wearing in some of them, and that was over 50 years ago!! A large part of them recorded my love story courtship and first marriage. And, as I think of it, which I have not in years until a couple of days ago and am now at a light-speed rate, I think Polaroid was solely for recording joy.”
“I mean, we look at a Polaroid and because of its materiality we assign a value to it that people 30 years ago never thought of doing. I’m thinking about when I first learned to take commercial pictures for advertising agencies - the test shots, which used to be Polaroids, were always just being that - tests. Afterward though, these test shots were all that remained of the photo shoots as the clients were only interested in the end product to be printed in a catalog or a brochure. The remaining Polaroid became a memory of a moment that captured one’s work life, not the intimacy or privacy of family. I cherish the Polaroids that I still have from that time, somewhere in a box in my old room in my parents’ house...”