This was my first car, a 1984 Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport station wagon. My parents bought this car new in 1984 and drove it until 1991, when they bought a new minivan. Since I would get my drivers license the next year, they kept the old station wagon for me to drive. I wrecked it six months after I got my license! My dad kept the car around for a few more years, selling off mechanical parts from it, like the engine and transmission (which were undamaged in the wreck). I made this photo of the car a couple years after I wrecked it.

This is a Polaroid SX-70 Manipulation. Polaroid SX-70 was the first "All in one" Polaroid film; unlike earlier Polaroid films, you did not have to peel apart the film to get the finished print. Unlike the later Polaroid 600 and Spectra films, the image of an SX-70 print remained soft for several minutes after the image had completely developed. This was discovered soon after the film was introduced back in the 1970s and artists began using blunt tools like wooden sticks and crochet needles to smear the image and push parts of it around under the clear plastic that covered the front surface.

I learned to do this in art school in the late 1990s. Unfortunately the Polaroid SX-70 film was discontinued only a couple years later, so I have only a handful of these images. The Polaroid SX-70 film sold today is a totally different material that was introduced a few years ago by the newly resurrected Polaroid company. Unfortunately, the new SX-70 film hardens before the image appears and cannot be manipulated like the old stuff. Images like this can never be made again.

October 1994