We have lift off! Polaroid lift off that is…

Here we go again and by jove this time we have achieved lift off! Polaroid lift off that is. Let me take you on a messy journey through my first attempt at this beautiful medium.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a one trick pony, meaning I am dedicated to Hassy for life. However, my head has been turned by the beauty of polaroid lifts. There’s something whimsical about them that appeals to my aesthetic somehow and has tempted me to stray away from the safe and familiar bosom of my beloved. The question is, how can I do it and still keep it Hassy centric?

I toyed with the idea of acquiring an OG Hasselblad polaroid back. They’re incredibly cheap online these days, suspiciously too cheap. It transpires that the old boy back requires a discontinued film so that´s the end of that idea. There is an Instax back for the v series but the film is not compatible with the lifting game.

Creating successful lift off demands Polaroid i-type or 600 series films, thus requiring an actual polaroid camera for exposure. Although not massively keen on the idea I decided having a cheeky Polaroid as a side chick wouldn’t be so bad if it meant I could get in on the lifting game. I didn’t particularly like any of the actual cameras but then the solution appeared in the form of the Polaroid lab. A way to print my favourite hassy images, achieve lift off and become a new way to display my work. I find the idea of straddling the line of analogue and digital this way a little cute. Committing an image to film, using analogue developing processes, only to then scan it digitally and send it through the ether for it to then be re-imagined back into analogue form. Ain’t technology grand!

Onward and with a shiny new lab in tow I now had some prints to play lift off with, time for the main event. Research dictated that to achieve my lifty goals I would need warm/hot water, a dish, some small paint brushes, scissors and watercolour paper. I had everything to hand except for the paper but decided to plow on regardless with what I had to hand, which was Ilford multigrade glossy paper that had already been ripped into test strips.

Down to the nitty gritty and I cut off the edges of the roid as close to the picture as possible. I used common man scissors but I’ve seen others employ scalpels to gradually shave down the edges until you’re as close to the image as you dare. Whatever floats your boat but the common man scissor worked just fine for me.

Next step is to peel apart the front from the back, aka the plastic bit from the roid backing, somewhere in which is the emulsion. It came apart remarkably easily on the first try (although not the second). This and other factors led to my initial theory that the older the roid the better it achieves lift off. It didn’t seem to matter which film had been used either just age. The sheets formed an emulsion sandwich containing the front plastic, white chalky shit, the emulsion itself and the backing all smashed together.

On peeling I was getting the plastic front, then the emulsion, then the layer of white shit in one hand and the backing paper in the other. I watched a video later where someone used voodoo when peeling. With unnatural ease they managed to do it backwards to me somehow and upon successful peelage was left with the clear plastic in one hand and the emulsion stuck to the roid backing in the other. This significantly improved the ease in which to get to lift off, stark contrast to what I achieved. Perhaps it was practice rather than dark magic but for now I’m sticking with unnatural entities at work.

After peeling I placed the image in the empty tray plastic side down, chalky shit up. I poured hot but not boiling water over the top making sure to soak the back and leave it floating in its own juices. Initially I thought my water might have been too hot as the white stuff blistered almost immediately whereas I thought it was supposed to be a slower, more subtle eruption. However, I followed through, gently circulating the water around the edges with my delicate paint brush. The idea is to coax the emulsion from the plastic by wafting water into the forming bubbles so it detaches itself in an ethereal manner. Ethereal was not in the room with us on that day, just loud musings and swearing at my overzealous impatient pudding hands, riding an emotional rollercoaster of my own design.

Against all odds and an unfortunate ripping incident I did manage to coax the emulsion off. Youtube told me to have a second tray of room temperature water to transfer the now detached floaty into for subsequent capture onto paper. The Youtube guy used his watercolour paper to transfer the floater over carefully, I on the other hand do not possess that level of patience. With an already ripped emulsion globbule I decided fuck it and scooped it up with my brush and hoyed it into the other tray in one fluid motion. Both methods produced the same results and mine didn’t hurt the snotty mess any further so I prefer my way of hoying with a paint brush.

The secondary less hot tray is to enable you to manipulate your ethereal lift but without it becoming too pliable and unwieldy. Encouraging it to adhere to paper is a science all in itself. Have you ever had a solitary stray tea leaf floating around in your cuppa and no matter how much you chase it around with a teaspoon the little fecker just always seems to duck and dive from its path? It’s just like that, except the tea leaf is a lot bigger and you’re chasing it with a sheet of paper instead of a spoon but the slippery fucker will still manage to slop it’s way off the edge just when you think you’ve got it cornered.

An unexpected consequence of using photographic paper was as soon as the strips touched daylight they started to rapidly change colour like a pasty kid on the beach. It changed from white to a lovely shade of nicotine yellow to lobster pink within 5 minutes flat. The added twist was the glossy texture repelled the newly separated emulsion lift, which had a penchant to slide south and slop straight back into the water. Two emulsions don´t make a right. After the first escapade of slippy slidey emulsion I remedied this by using the back side of the paper which was still bright white and mercifully not glossy. Bonafide watercolour paper should resolve the issue.

Once the emulsion was on the paper it inevitably screwed itself into an ugly blob. I dipped one edge at a time in and out the water hokey pokey style to encourage it to lay down nicer which worked well. Once satisfied the position was as good as it was going to get, I used the paintbrush to gently sweep across the image to eliminate wrinkles and fine tune the edges. Despite the salmon pink paper that´d inexplicably gone crusty and a giant rip down the middle I did achieve lift off on my first try and I’m happy with that achievement.

The second attempt went wonky from the start when half the image remained on the backing paper. Going from bad to worse when the hot water bath refused to show even the slightest sign it was going to do anything to the image. Eventually I abandoned it as a failure. This played further into my theory that the print´s age mattered because this one had been made only the day before whereas the success story had been taken over a month previous.

By the semi-successful next couple of lifts above I’d become somewhat of an expert in my own mind and overconfident, inevitably taking it too far and practically boiling the two black and white prints with water that had barely left the boil before it had been poured over them. Their emulsions slid straight off the plastic like they’d been ordered to at gunpoint and recoiled into floating alien shapes in the water. Alien number 1 swiftly intensified into unyielding snot when faced with the bristles of my tiny paint brush and had to be abandoned. Today it lives out its best life in the sewers of Reykjavík. Alien number 2 was marginally more compliant and did adhere to the paper but had bloated to a gargantuan size and looked considerably pastier than whence it started. Time to call it a day but not before sending at least one more to join its snotty alien friend in the sewers.

Despite yielding a mixed bag of results I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and firmly believe there’s beauty in the attempt. I am going to try this again with some modifications:

1. I’m not convinced a second tray is necessary, it seems like an extra step with no benefit.

2. I think using my darkroom trays was an over exaggeration on required surface area. Most people on the internet seemed to settle on a smaller receptacle and I think I can see merit in that.

3. Obviously use the correct paper for the job.

Above all else I need to dig down into my inner clumsy clambering moron and try to summon some patience so that maybe, just maybe, I won’t add any more snot aliens to the sewage systems of Reykjavík.

*Addendum*

The above was written in the days that followed the first attempt to lift and contained all information and data collected during that time. However, fast forward one week later and I’ve performed a second attempt with the modifications discussed and I would like to share the results of that as an addendum to the original article as there are some findings that directly contradict initial thoughts.

1. While a second tray isn’t 100% necessary it was good to have it at times. If nothing else it became an emulsion snot graveyard.

2. A smaller receptacle is bullshit. If anything it made the whole process harder and didn’t even keep the water hotter for longer, which I thought it would have. I ended up retreating back to the trusty tray, at least I could get a good rock on with it.

3. Watercolour paper is a revelation.

4. Age does matter just not in the way I initially thought and this is a biggie. Older is not better, newer is! Let me explain more about how I came to this whopping game changer of a conclusion.

Despite channeling my inner zen master the second round of testing broke me inside a little bit. Every time I peeled a roid I would have oodles of the white chalky shit adhered firmly to the back of the emulsion. Some of this white shit comes off in the water if you brush at it (promptly turning your water milky white so I don’t recommend it as it doesn’t actually help anything). But for the most part this white shit seemed to make the whole lifting process take 10 times longer.

I spent what felt like hours teasing the edges of my first lift but it seemed determined to stay put. Eventually I succeeded and got the emulsion onto my lovely new paper but by that time it had bloated unattractively, also coming with a gluey residue on top further adding to the whole undesirableness.

Soul now fully destroyed, I just could not get anything to lift. No bubbles, no bloating, no aliens, nothing but unyielding snot. My faith in the whole process and my dreams of becoming the lift master of Iceland were in the toilet, much like the snot I was producing on mass.

I became the living embodiment of the saying that the definition of insanity is performing the same task over and over but expecting different results. But instead of throwing a toddler style tantrum I took a break to consult with youtube for guidance. Most importantly I wanted to know how to peel a roid without leaving the white residue of doom on the image because I feel like that was the answer to getting a successful lift.

It transpires that the original voodoo girl who managed to seamlessly peel hers by removing the plastic first is the key. I found others, others who shared this power but without giving any explanations on how they were doing it. Then one guy, Saviour Bob we’ll call him, gave sage advice that the whole process works better if the print is fresher, the fresher the better.

With nothing left to lose I printed off three shiny new polaroids with the lab and left them to develop while I tackled one more of the many i´d mistakenly made in advance. Stubborn little feckers still wouldn’t bubble, not even threats of violence were persuading them to lift. At some point the Hobbit carefully broached the question of why I was still going and he got some kind of mad gibbering snarled response about needing to know if Bob was right about the age thing but I had to wait for them to fully develop first.

Saviour Bob is a god amongst men. Not only was he spot on about newer being better but it was like a whole new world. I peeled the plastic off those bitches like I was the queen voodoo lady herself. No white chalky shit or glue in the way, clean as a whistle and in my other hand grasped a fresh juicy emulsion stuck to the backing sheet. I poured the water in and the emulsion said “oh hi, you want me to leave? Why didn’t you say so, here you go” and plops straight into the water in one glorious piece. Getting it onto paper is still a work in progress but once there, the difference is night and day to the globby thick lifts i´d produced previously.

Now I’ve figured out the grand secret I can carry on playing to my heart’s content, lifting and sticking to stuff. The moral of the story is to not give up, avoid the white shit (titanium dioxide apparently) and listen to Bob because he knows things.

Come find me at www.hassywonderland.com or @hassywonderland on Instagram 🙂

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