Description
It was late 1999 or 2000. I had spent the day on a fashion shoot, and my apartment was littered with clothes and props. My girlfriend jumped out of the shower while I was messing around with a Big Shot Polaroid, a clunky, plastic box camera that I found in my parents’ attic. She was pretty beat, but I had 10 Polaroids that needed using, I had found this amazing Chanel glove and so she agreed to pose.
Shooting on a Big Shot isn’t easy: you can only shoot from a specific distance, and it’s really designed for head-and-shoulders portraits. But when she slid the glove on and bent forward, I knew it was the perfect shot – simple, straightforward, graphic and just so sexy. When I developed it, I stuck it in my portfolio and thought nothing more of it.
On 16 January 2001, I met The Stokes. It was my first commission for The Face . I’d heard snippets of their early music but I was more excited about the commission than I was about meeting them.
“If you look at the thigh you’ll see a light water stain which is on the negative permanently. This was shot on 665 Polaroid which was a B&W polaroid that yielded a positive and a negative when peeled. Back then I was “Mr. 665”. You would have to peel the excess paper from the negative and then put it in a tupperware filled with water to soak. The water would turn black as the coating on the neg dissolved, and then you would need to rinse it and hang it to dry. I would have 10-20 negs in the tupperware on top of each other, and the fragile nature of the film would almost guarantee some marks. I’m lucky there’s not a big scratch on it! These inherent markings always occur with 665 polaroid negs. It’s from the peeling process. I love imperfections and I understand some people might not like that but I think others won’t mind. For me the imperfections just add to the street cred of the image.”
