Sam's Food City

I'm submitting this as a diptych to illustrate something about one of my favourite films, the now-defunct Polaroid Type 85 film. I love this film because you get dramatic blacks and whites with super-high contrast, and you also get a nifty negative. Leave it to Polaroid to destroy yet another photographer's dream medium. I only have 28 shots left.

This is a very difficult film to scan. The positives are adorable little squares with all kinds of flaws. You have to fix the image with a sticky chemical fixative that leaves lots of gooey traces on the original positive. Those are wonderfully imperfect on the object, but just look like scanner lint when scanned. The negatives, whether printed or scanner, never give you the same contrasts nor textures of the original positives. Still, they are wonderful keepsakes!

This is one of my favourite images I've ever taken. I cannot explain why to you; it's just a personal association. I shot this on New Year's Eve 2006 in Modesto, California. This is Sam's Food City. It was the grocery store of my childhood neighborhood. It's a working class area of Modesto and Sam's has managed to survive as an independent grocery store in that tough neighborhood. I grew up riding my bike over to Sam's to pick up syrup for Sunday's pancakes; I knew all of the checkers and the bag man, Sing, a refugee from Vietnam, a real fixture in my youthful memories; I loved to wander the meager toy aisle between canned foods and dry goods; I rode the horse in the front more times than I could tell you. This place was a real part of the neighborhood, and I'm glad to see that it still is. It's too bad our society is increasingly chain-based and places like Sam's Food City are disappearing from our landscape. I hope Sam's is in business for many years to come.

Holgaroid/Type 85/Positive on the left/Negative on the right.