I made a new zine. Offseason, Issue 2, is devoted to postcards. When you would go to a motel on the Jersey Shore, there would be postcards in the desk showing the motel, which you were welcome to send to friends and family. This zine pretends to be a collection of such postcards. They are a mix of motels (mostly), businesses (a few), and attractions (a couple), and mostly from New Jersey. The zine is presented as a booklet from which you can remove the postcards and send them, much like little booklets of postcards you can get in gift shops on the shore. It’s bound using that sticky stuff that’s used to make pads of paper. There are 20 postcards included. I printed the cards myself on an Epson 3880 printer on linen postcard paper. I did my best to replicate the look of 1950s motel postcards with a modern process. I’m charging $12 to ship to the US, $16 elsewhere. It’s available from my Etsy site.
Posted at 2:38 PM
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As we approach the election of 2024, something that is on everyone’s minds is freedom. As in, what does it mean, and will we still enjoy it after the results of the election are announced. Yale professor Timothy Snyder has written a book on the subject called “On Freedom”. I’ve read it twice this season. It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read. For this Polaroid Week, I’ve created pictures based on interpretations of points made in his book.
Snyder posits that there is a difference in conceptions of freedom, one of which is negative freedom, which can be thought of as “freedom from”, and positive freedom, or “freedom to”. Postive freedom is about enabling free people to live their lives to the fullest, and negative freedom is about preventing anything from preventing you from doing whatever you want. Positive freedom leads to democracy. Negative freedom leads in the opposite direction.
There are five components to positive freedom in Snyder’s estimation. The first of these is Sovereignty. Each person is sovereign over their own selves. They are responsible for their own being, their own decisions, their own beliefs. The task of a parent raising a child is to teach them to be a sovereign being, capable of judging right from wrong and living their life in a way that is true to themselves.
My first entry for Polaroid Week represents Sovereignty with a mixed media piece, one of my construction paper people on Polaroid Retinex Type-I film, with a piece of construction paper glued onto the frame so it extends outside the circular frame of the Retinex film.
The second component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Unpredictability. Corporations and politicians wish to make you predictable. Surveillance capitalism takes advantage of the capabilities of the Internet to track everything you do, use that to build a profile about you, and predict your desires for consumer products, which politicians you support, your sexual orientation, basically everything about you so that they can take advantage of that predictability to sell you something, either products or politics. A free person is unpredictable, and cannot be reduced to a list of attributes. Unpredictability is therefore the second component of positive freedom.
My second entry for Polaroid Week represents Unpredictability with the combination of two photographs. The photographs have been sliced halfway through, and slid together to form a single work.
The third component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Mobility. Originally in America, this was perhaps about moving to the frontier, as the country expanded, and having the ability to build one’s own life in new places. After the frontier closed, mobility in America became more about social mobility, the ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder and join the middle class. Increasing wealth inequality leads to less ability to do so; the ability to be mobile is a critical part of positive freedom.
My third entry for Polaroid Week represents Mobility with the addition of a motion blur filter from the Polaroid Spectra family of cameras, part of the Special Effects Filters package. I placed this over the lens of my Mint SLR-670X with I-Type support as I shot a portrait using Polaroid Retinex film.
The fourth component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Factuality. To quote Snyder, “Freedom is not us against the world but us within the world, knowing it and changing it.” In order to exist within the world as free people, we must understand the world. The ability to accept facts and truth are crucial to freedom. Lies are the foundation of negative freedom. To be truly free, we must be fact-oriented. Those who lead us by lies lead us into unfreedom.
My fourth entry for Polaroid Week represents Factuality by using the page of a dictionary as the basis of the “face” of one of my Retinex portraits. The dictionary defines the meanings of words. Practitioners of negative freedom will often redefine words or use them to mean things that they do not actually mean.
The fifth component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Solidarity. We cannot claim freedom for ourselves and deny it to others. Freedom only makes sense when we recognize in others the things we see in ourselves. America’s motto is E Pluribus Unum; Out of Many, One. What is that but an expression of solidarity? Those who dehumanize others are not interested in your freedom. Unions place solidarity at the top of their principles. We cannot be free unless we are all free.
My fifth entry for Polaroid Week represents Solidarity by photographing all my previous entries, plus a couple others, using the same Retinex film to give the impression of a single body made up all other bodies. I used the hexaprism filter from my Spectra Special Effects filter pack with my Mint SLR-670X Ming Edition I-Type camera.
This ends my Polaroid Week series for Autumn, 2024. I hope this has piqued your interest in Snyder’s book and made you think about freedom in perhaps a different way than you have before. Snyder’s book is available at https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom. If you’re American, election day is in a few days. Vote. Vote for freedom. Vote for freedom for all of us.
Posted at 12:48 AM
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