an emulsion lift is one of the really interesting things you can do with a polaroid print after it has been developed.  the process intrigued me and now that i’ve got my hands on an honest-to-goodness polaroid, i had to try it.  i’ve got a vision of a series of shots i want to do when Brooke Lynne comes to town next weekend.  but its hard to do something like this without at least practicing first.  i am frequently surprised at how quickly i can zero-in on the root cause of a problem and fix it, especially when it comes to photography!

the emulsion lift process typically involves soaking the polaroid print in hot water for a few minutes and, like magic, the emulsion will start to separate from the paper.  for the polaroid 664 film that i was using, it takes water a bit hotter, so you’ve got to soak the print in boiling water for up to 15 minutes.  my first few attempts at this didn’t go very well.  while the emulsion started to peel away at the edges of the print, it didn’t release totally.  and trying to pull the thin emulsion from the paper caused it to rip.  and once the pieces of emulsion are separated from the paper, they’re thin as jellyfish and getting them back together is nearly impossible.  the emulsion is so thin and light there’s almost no way to actually feel when you’re touching it.

but i did have one print where the emulsion seemed to lift much more easily and i tried to deduce what was different about this print.  at first i thought it was that the print had a lot less shadow areas where there was less dye impregnated in the emulsion.  so i tried another print that had less black in the emulsion.  but the emulsion on this print refused to lift as well.  and then i realized that the real difference was that i used a much shorter development time with the prints where the emulsion lifted easily .  so, i did an experiment with some of the remaining frames from the pack.  i developed these prints for only 30 seconds instead of 45 seconds.  i let the prints dry for a few hours and when i tried to lift the emulsions, they came off with out any problems whatsoever.  bingo.  now i had a process for making this work.

however, its never really over until the process is truly complete as i just found out while fiddling with the completed transfers.  i’ve been applying some diluted acrylic gesso to the transfers to help adhere them to the paper.  however, this can cause problems because the emulsion seems to shrink as it dries, bending the paper and separating the emulsion from the paper in the middle.  attempting to flatten the image only cause the emulsion to rip and tear.  it seems like i might be able to solve this by bathing the paper and emulsion in a cool water bath prior to final adherence to the paper.  this would allow the emulsion to shrink naturally before it is applied to the paper.  back to the drawing board in a sense…

First attempt at a Polaroid Emulsion Lift, the emulsion ripped and this was the only part of the image i could get onto the transfer paper.

A later emulsion lift. Only part of the emulsion tore this time.

The most successful lift, even after drying, this print is mostly in tact and can probably be salvaged after a soak in some warm water.