POLAROID TRANSPARENCY

Polaroid Transparency is an experimental workshop exploring the hidden material structure of instant photography. By carefully separating a Polaroid photograph into its individual layers during development, participants transform the image from a conventional photographic object into a transparent surface that can be further manipulated, layered, and recomposed.

The process reveals the photograph as something constructed from multiple physical layers rather than as a single flat image. Once separated from its original structure, the transparent photographic image can be combined with coloured backgrounds, overlapped with other photographs, or assembled into multilayered compositions. Several transparencies can be placed on top of one another, allowing separate images to merge into a new visual space.

Participants can work with photographs taken during the workshop or use existing digital images transferred onto Polaroid material through a Polaroid Lab. This creates an additional possibility of moving an image from a digital archive back into a physical photographic form before transforming it manually.

The workshop encourages participants to approach photography as a material that can be opened, dismantled, and reconstructed. The resulting works range from individual transparent Polaroids to layered photographic collages, each becoming a unique object shaped through experimentation, chance, and physical intervention.