Welcome back to Viewfinder, our newest feature highlighting interesting people and the Impossible projects they are working on. This week, we trained our lens on Nate Matos…
“I’m 24, living in (the dream of the 90s) Portland, Oregon. About a year ago I had decided I wanted to do a 365 project. It was something I had always been aware of but never found the gumption to do. I have a bad habit of starting projects and not completing them. I wasn’t sure how it would help me to complete it either if it was a series of snapshots I popped off with a digital camera either.
Lucky for me about 6 months prior to this I had made my first order from Impossible for a few packs of PX 70 First Flush and some PX 600 First Flush and instantly (pardon the pun) fell in love with the process. I was still very new to instant photography, other than the occasional photo with the family Polaroid, or the very few samples I still have from my iZone, which happened to be the first camera I ever purchased for myself. Since then however, I have amassed a small army of instant cameras. But I always seem to turn to the first SX-70 I purchased years ago.
So I saw starting a year long journey with Impossible film as a great commitment to both myself and the brand. I started out by planning very carefully things I could shoot in case I ran out of ideas. Fortunately for me the opposite happened and I had an abundance of things I wanted to photograph. Including a week of old cars back in March, a week of deStijl images, and my most proud moment of the project: Roid Week. In an effort to challenge myself, I wandered about Portland for 5 days shooting 4 portraits of strangers with my Polaroid Macro 5. That week long journey has now branched off to become its own separate project I am currently working on. With a goal of getting 100 portraits of strangers all sticking to the same formula I started with during Roid Week.
My 365 project hasn’t all been good however, such as day 249, where in the last moments of the day I fired off an image only to have it come out blank. So I drew a picture on it. Or day 47: when I thought it would be interesting to see the results of a Polaroid being microwaved…while forgetting about the foil inside.
With only 54 days to go at the time of writing this (year 1 ends on 12/31/11) I’m seriously contemplating going on to a second year. I’ve learned so much about the intricacies of the film itself, as well as learned a thing or two about yours truly. My only concern is if I go on to year 2, whats to stop me from doing a 3rd?”
Thank you to Nate for taking part! To see more of his work, please visit www.the-365-project.com
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