you will miss me when i burn
By Mikael Kennedy
31 May 2008
I've been shooting Polaroid portraits of some of these people for almost 10 years now. Last year while traveling I met a photographer who used to work for Polaroid who, when he saw what I had been working on, told me that he had a few boxes of old film back at his place in California. When he returned home he sent me his last 15 packs of Time Zero film that had expired in 1997. I knew that I would never see film like this again so I decided to try and take one portrait of as many of the people whom I had photographed over the years as I could before the film ran out. The film was so expired that the batteries in the packs no longer worked, to use it I had to turn off all the lights in my room and crawl under my covers to transfer the unexposed film to an empty but fresh 600 Polaroid film cartridge. It seemed important to me collect portraits of these people with this film before both were gone. An old friend of mine died when I was working on this and that was on my mind a lot. I started to think of these portraits as those who might miss me if I died, shot with this film that was dying. The title of this project comes from the title of a song by Will Oldham that I kept repeating to myself while I was working on this, "you will miss my when I burn"
