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Heading down New York’s West Side Highway on a late summer afternoon, the thunder storms kicked up and I was worried that my planned Impossible photo shoot would be a washout. After I parked and left my bags in the studio, the rain stopped and the sun started to peak through the clouds. I grabbed my SLR 680 and 4 packs of Impossible PX600 and headed towards the river. It was hot and humid and I was worried about the film’s sensitivity, given my past experience with earlier versions of the film. I knew I needed to protect the film upon exit, so I made sure I had plenty of black cards from previous PX film packs. To my pleasant surprise, the heat and humidity did not adversely impact processing, it was very consistent. If anything, it may have moved the tone to the warm side, but I have never minded that. I wound my way down the river and headed east to City Hall Park. The fountain and gaslights make you feel like you are back in the 19th Century. I showed some of these images to my friend Elsa Dorfman and she commented that this was the “Atget” film. With the right subject matter, it seems as though Eugene Atget is making the images. Maybe Paris should be next.

When I began working on my SX-70 constructions in the early seventies collage was one of my main interests. Over a decade before Photoshop was born I was always looking for ways to combine images and images with paint. In returning to these techniques with the new Impossible films I cannot turn back the clock on my knowledge of Photoshop and return to those blissful days. As I always did with my images in the Polaroid days, I try to throw nothing away. Test exposures can become your best pieces if you combine them with the right elements. Two of these three images were overexposed and would not really work well with painting. While the dyes are thin, the frame contains an image structure as well as interesting textures that come from taking the film unit apart. Full size collage elements are added and glued in from behind with acrylic gel medium. In some instances a bit of paint is applied first to render some areas opaque or only semi transparent. The layering effect looks as if it is straight out of my Photoshop imagery and I imagine my digital collages certain influence these. I don’t think they would have quite turned out this way thirty years ago.

Continuing my exploration of the manipulative qualities of PX-680 Color Shade film, we look at adding paint. When this image emerged from the SX-70 base of my Daylab, I stripped the negative away from the positive in the first several minutes, once the image had appeared. Later, when it was dry I rinsed off the titanium dioxide residue, being careful not to disturb the dyes. You are left with a transparent image. I later added acrylic paint, establishing a broader color palette. It has been 30 years since I painted inside such a small image. When painting from behind, your strategy of laying down color has to be different. Any small details are added first, middle ground next and broader background last. I am sure I will get a better grasp on it as I paint more, I am a little rusty. The scans show the stripped PX680 on the left with the Titanium dioxide still present, the center scan is the paint from behind and the right scan is the image viewed from the front.

It has now been 31 years since I last worked on my SX-70 Constructions. The advent of Time Zero in 1979 put an end to the kind of emulsion stripping and emulsion transfers that I could accomplish with the “Q” film or what TZ’s predecessor was known inside Polaroid. I returned to using TZ in the early 2000’s to do a splitting technique, where I split open the TZ film moments after it left the camera (or Daylab SX-70 base, as was more often the case). This split caused some very interesting textures that when scanned and enlarged yielded some interesting effects. I had assumed that I could never replicate the techniques I used with the Polaroid “Q” film. Until now. These are the results of some experiments this weekend to see if PX680 could be deconstructed and reconstructed a la the “Q” film. I carefully cut off the negatives from several pieces of film that had been processed at least 5 days ago. The negative stripped easily, leaving the positive with its titanium dioxide backing. I then washed them under warm water. With TZ film the dyes would remain solidly adhered to the mordant layer of the transparent positive. Not so with PX680. The dyes quickly softened and could be moved around. I left two images (the two nudes) in a half distorted state to dry. With the image of the seated figure I back-painted the entire image with white acrylic paint. With the standing figure, I partially painted her with white and then collaged a landscape element from behind using gel medium. For the middle image I soaked the positive image until the dyes floated freely from the polyester sheet. I transferred it to watercolor paper, cut away portions I did not want, and glued the dyes back into their original frame and back-painted it also with white. I rushed the drying with a hair dryer so I could finish these in one session. It would be much better to be patient and let everything air dry, which I will do going forward. Another landscape was collaged behind the statue image. These are the first experiments to prove to myself that PX680 is worth the effort and the answer is an unequivocal YES!