Death of Polaroid / Moerenuma

As everyone knows they stopped making Polaroid film and the last batch expired more than a month ago now. I still had two films (one left now) and was looking forward to using them up, so I took the big, lumpy camera-cum-spaceship to Moerenuma Park when Andy, Yuki, Tara and I went there for an "outing" last week.

The first time I pressed the button on the new film two pictures came out at once, one blank, the other partly ruined / enhanced by the effect you can see below (hint: there wasn't really a giant caramel blanket over half of the world). After that the camera refused to finish the film and now the plastic film cartridge seems to be jammed in.

So maybe they weren't shitting about that expiry date huh?!

Or maybe it's just that I've got some midas touch that breaks cameras at the moment.

Either way, I'm really happy with the way some of these shots came out. In scanning them I've tried to preserve the "Polaroid Palette" as much as possible. As Andy said, it has an instant-nostalgia effect - when he looked at the snaps he felt like it was the record of some warm, old memory; when in fact the trip had been earlier that day.





I hope you enjoyed that latest installment of "The Last Days of Polaroid." I'm going to take a knife to the camera and try to drag it out a little longer.

Park Review! Moerenuma Park!

How do you rate parks? Well, I give Moerenuma Park, in the East of Sapporo, five out of five. That's like five non-functioning fountains out of five, or five mysterious pyramid constructions out of five!

Moerenuma Park was designed by the artist Isamu Noguchi and is just a wonderful, beautiful place. The last time I was there was to go sledding in the snow over a year ago, and though I thought I'd been there since... I guess I hadn't because all of this was new to me:





Mostly Moerenuma park feels like a huge set for a 1970s Sci-Fi flick about a utopian society that worships pyramids but eventually turns against itself in an orgy of violence and ray guns.

The only problem was that since Sapporo is still recovering from being violently assaulted by winter for four or five months, the grass was hardly a verdant green, and they haven't turned most of the fountains on yet. But we randomly happened upon the Sea Fountain display which had only started the day before. It was big, beautiful and soothing and very nautical, but a little simple.