Jamie Ribisi-Braley

First couple of shots with the Impossible Film

Ready for some fun!

I must have spent a small fortune on Polaroid film back in the day. But the satisfaction of an instant image spitting out of that camera and knowing that it was the only one of its kind was fantastic.  As a painter, I really enjoy the unexpected color and light that a Polaroid camera and film capture.  I can't tell you how sad I was when they closed their factories and stopped producing film.  But I hung on to most of my Polaroid cameras hoping that the film would make a comeback one day.  Well, that day has come!

The Impossible Project is now producing film to be used in Polaroid cameras.  They purchased an old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands and have resurrected it to make artists like us happy.  You can read all about their story on their website here.

They had an in-person only sample sale of their expired film a little while ago and I begged anyone in the NY area to please stop by their studio and pick me up some....through the fate of "putting it to Facebook," as my family and I now say, my friend happened to be walking down the same street and checking FB from her phone.  So she called me, went in, and mailed me my purchase!!

I've only taken three photos. The first one was a complete dud but the next two came out ok (above.)  This pack had an expiration date of August 2011 so they're not very much past their expiration date yet they had some neat effects. There are some areas of high grain which is pretty interesting.  The brown areas at the top may be from my rollers needing to be cleaned; I'll experiment with that for the next photographs.

I'm very excited to work with this film again-- it handles differently than original Polaroid film so there's going to be a slight learning curve but I'm ready to dive in and see what happens.