56. February 2011: Sean Rohde

Much of what Sean Rohde photographs is really quite mundane. He has a particular fetish for chairs and couches, though they may be out of place on a high desert plain or on a front porch. He likes mailboxes. He likes camper vans, and regular vans. He likes classic cars and ugly cars. He likes small, tacky yard figurines. He likes the small, tacky houses that they sit in front of. Most of all, he likes the Southwestern United States: the abandoned buildings and autos; the aging neighborhoods; and the dry, empty desert. He likes the oranges and browns and reds (pretty much everything in the Southwest) in contrast to the deep blue “forever” skies, sometimes peppered with fluffy white clouds. He likes horizons that are 75 miles away. Sean’s photography is a combination of exploration and experimentation. He worked his way into the world of Polaroid and instant film soon after his introduction to toy cameras with the square-format Type 80 films and a simple Square Shooter (well, maybe not so simple, as Sean modified his first Polaroid camera), moving on to Type 100s when the 80s were discontinued. A few years later and Sean has many Polaroid cameras added to the collection, a blog that lets him talk about cameras and modifying cameras, a Flickr page with almost 2,000 Polaroids posted (and probably at least 2,000 more that he will never post), some published photos and commercial ventures, and now a show that he hopes represents some of his best work. The photos shown here are color peel-apart Polaroid instant film prints: Type 669 and ID-UV. Cameras used for these shots are the Colorpack III, 180, 190, 195 and Konica Instant Press. - - - “I see, I shoot, I peel.” - - - http://moominsean.blogspot.com/ - - - http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjrohde/