Nostalgia for snow. 2.

A couple of years ago I wasted rather a lot of money on 5 x 4 Polaroid film and a slide printer in a failed attempt to make Polaroid transfer prints – described by a friend as “photographs of memories”. No matter what combination of receptor paper and heating and wetting I tried, I could never successfully transfer the negative onto the paper as the blacks were always left behind on the piece of film. As I grew to understand how effective this treatment can be in conjuring a sense of “the past” from contemporary pictures, so I saw its place in Rewilding Childhood - where we talk about people’s childhood memories and more recently, in Nostalgia for Snow. With “proper” Polaroid transfers off the menu, I began to diddle around with Photoshop and PhotoFrame trying to find a way to mimic the effect of transfer prints, especially in respect of the weird colour shifts reminiscent of old colour snapshots from the ’50′s and ’60′s. The point of employing these devices, as always, is to place the picture firmly in the past in the viewer’s mind. Indeed, skiing at Glenshee, where this picture was shot 10 years ago, is pretty much a thing of the past already. And I’m asking viewers to image 30 years into the future when they look at these pictures! The second picture shows the church at Trinity, Newfoundland, somewhere that may be as black as Scotland in winter in 30 year’s time.