Somewhere Between Morrill & China Maine

May 2025

Erik Lomen: Tell me about the origins of this series and the process of manipulating these polaroids.

Eero Ruuttila: If there is an origin story to my polaroids it comes as a convergence of interests while I was a 30 year old produce buyer for NEFCO, a New England based consumer food cooperative federation. It was the early 1980’s. I was working to build a rationale for our client coop members to support an alternative food distribution network. I was making links with a new generation of small-scale local & mostly organic farmers, bringing their New England grown produce into our coop warehouse. We were the pioneers of the farm-table movement. Our market strategy was to differentiate what was produced locally from what was coming into our Northeast region from large conventional farms on the West Coast and Mexico. As both a produce buyer & as a self-taught researcher I wrote for our food coop newsletter raising concerns about the risks of pesticides as they were used in industrial-scale agriculture. I would ask the fate of pesticide compounds as they migrated through our living environment. What food policies determined the safety of pesticide residues in our foods, what effects did pesticides have on the health of farmworkers & warehouse workers, what pesticides represented elevated threats to infants and pregnant mothers & sundry other concerns to be investigated.

A Missouri farmer friend suggested I write to an organization she was connected to, The Threshold Foundation, whose mission it was to support unusual inquiries. I wrote to the foundation and I was awarded $10,000 to investigate “the potential health risks of post-harvest pesticides / pesticides used to enhance fresh produce shelf-life & to protect stored grains.”

Pesticides applied to foods after harvest? That was the question I would investigate for the next 2 years. It was also when I began to take polaroids. I moved to a cheap apartment outside of Central Square. I left my job as a produce buyer. I spent most of my days either at the MIT Science Library near Central Square Cambridge or at the Boston Public Library in their federal documents microfiche reader room. The modern internet did not exist in 1985. MIT’s main Science Library had a vast collection of food industry publications where I would go to study food science technologies. I scanned abstracts & read studies about pesticide residue testing chemistry, looked at grim animal study photos of twisted poultry exhibiting mutagenic effects of common fungicides, learned how environmental conditions could be manipulated to facilitate a pesticide migrate through a fruit’s barrier skin into its interior flesh. MIT librarians never asked for a student ID and were pleasantly accommodating in directing me to primary source materials for my research.

One afternoon while camped out in the basement of the library, I was on my way to a library Xerox machine. I was distracted by a stack of glossy photo magazines. I broke from my pesticide studies and got lost browsing through rare, out-of-print early editions of Aperture magazine. Moving on I discovered rows of photo books. Here were histories of art photography, renowned photographer monographs, Zone system manuals, student thesis portfolios & more. Minor White had been invited to MIT in 1964 to establish a photography studies program. He was the founder and long term editor of Aperture, a beautifully produced & highly regarded photo magazine. I came to realize, Minor White’s photo resources, curated for his photography program students were in the same basement nook as the Xerox machine. It became a ritual to take reading breaks and wander over to Minor White’s collection of photo books to experience Dust Bowl refugee portraits by FSA photographers of the 1930’s or explore landscape photography of the Great American West as documented by Timothy Sullivan’s horse drawn large format camera or whatever else drew me into this other world of photographic art and visual expression. In the basement of MIT’s great science library I embarked on a parallel study of the history of photography, utilizing Minor White’s eye as a guide & necessary balm to the grim news of America’s pesticide industry and its direct links to modern industrial agriculture.

Uh, what was the original question?

OK…

Sometime in 1984 when wandering through the aisles of New York’s Strand Bookstore I found and purchased a discounted copy of Lustrum Press’s SX-70 ART. It was an early anthology of polaroids by known and unknown photographers using the SX-70 Polaroid camera. Victor McElheny wrote a detailed profile of the SX-70 Camera system as TechNotes at the back of the book. He included a section about how to alter SX-70 color values, how to trick the camera to make double exposures, and techniques to manipulate, scratch, distort and completely deconstruct SX-70 images.

I’d recently purchased a SX-70 Polaroid camera. I’d already seen Lucas Samaras’ heavily altered SX-70s. Wim Wenders’ main protagonist in his film Alice of the Cities, utilized a SX-70 camera in key moments of the film. I loved Wenders’ film and seeing the SX-70 in action. I was drawn to the idea of the SX-70 camera as an art machine. I experimented with different blunt tools to mix, blur, & streak the developer dyes as they floated in the layers of Polaroid’s patented chemistry. There was a certain magic to how one could direct the surface colors to a more pastel or luminous hue by a light touch. Sometimes using more pressure I would press through the surface layers to bring out the white substrate backing of the developer layers. The extra pressure introduced white artifacts to the image. One could create metallic streaks by pressing down hard to reveal the back mylar surface of the polaroid pouch. Heat and higher humidity would make the surface dyes more active. Cold temperatures introduced cracks to the image & accelerated the hardening of the SX-70 chemicals. My art kit was the camera, a crochet needle, a cigarette lighter & attention to the weather.

Erik: Was the SX-70 your first polaroid camera?

Eero: My 1st & only polaroid camera. I bought it used in 1984 from Ferranti-Dege, an independent camera & film processing store in Harvard Square. Their storefront faced Harvard University & two of their three display windows featured stock of their extensive used camera inventory. Little tags cataloged camera features & price. I would see other photographers standing out in front of Ferranti-Dege staring at their used vintage cameras. I bought my 1st Leica, a 1974 Leica CL film camera w/a 40mm M prime lens at Ferranti-Dege too.

Erik: You have a particular arrangement for these polaroids and it seems to correspond with words typewritten on the white pouch where the development paste originates. Was there a story to be told from the getgo or did the order emerge after all the polaroids had been shot?

Eero: Each of the polaroids originated from individual photographic impulses. Occasionally I took more than one shot of a particular setting. Regarding order to the polaroid series, nothing was preconceived. The polaroids represent individual moments of perception. Words would follow, usually by the time I was home and normally before I inserted the cured and altered polaroid into my Underwood typewriter. Word placement & spacing were part of an improvisation process. Once the typewriter key is struck, its ink is permanently registered onto the Polaroid. The smeared white substrate in the middle of it’s time to go, illustrates ink not fully cured when the polaroid was inserted into the typewriter carriage. The rollers holding down the polaroid left tracks before the dyes had cured. I used whiteout in one Polaroid for a correction. One Polaroid has an unintentional misspelling for a name I chose to leave uncorrected. Fixing words to the image are separate independent actions. There were times I’d wrestle for hours, even days to come up with the right words. For a few of the photos, I was never able to come up with anything appropriate. The polaroid remained blank. The cover photo is one of those blanks.

Erik: Countless photographers put up a hard wall between their work and wordy explanations. Talk to me about the intersection of words and photography for you and for this series.

Eero: Emily Dickinson said “Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant.” I’d say my intent is similar. Words are not captions.

Erik: Between what years did you produce these polaroids?

Eero: 1984-2004

Erik: Since there is an urgency to manipulate the developing photo as the chemistry remains in a state of plasticity for only a short while, does the process produce a sort of meditative state similar to wet plate photography?

Eero: I can’t speak for wet plate photography. I needed to focus as I raced time while the images cured to a colorfast state. I learned there was no going back once I activated the chemicals inside the plastic polaroid pouch. There are no 2nd chances with alterations either.

Erik: So you were researching pesticides in American agriculture at the time you were making these images; looking back, was there an interplay between the alchemy of the art and the alchemy of your research?

Eero: Polaroid’s research facilities were located adjacent to the MIT campus where I did the bulk of my pesticide technology research. I quite literally walked past the Polaroid film development laboratories on my way to MIT’s Science Library. Polaroid opened the Clarence Kennedy Gallery in the early 1970’s a couple of blocks from the MIT campus. The gallery exhibited shows of emerging and professional photographers who utilized Polaroid products. I went there often. One of my first polaroids was taken about a block from the gallery. A year earlier, The Cambridge Arts Council awarded Cambridge poet, Mark Pawlak, a stipend to paint graffiti poems on the walls of industrial neighborhoods in Cambridge. Lines from one of his poems are almost legible in my polaroid, Technology Garage. Mark was a proponent of Japanese haibun, a linked haiku journal writing form practiced by the famous Japanese itinerant poet, Basho. Appropriated language & terse direct observation of environmental phenomena are features of Mark’s haiku-like poems. On the TECHNOLOGY GARAGE concrete wall he’s spray-painted:

“Get the Hook / Wind This Chain / Chevrolet.”

It’s credible the physical location where I did my research, its techno-industrial setting, adjacent to Polaroid’s film development laboratories & MIT’s classrooms & science libraries, had their subtle influences. My early polaroid experiments originated within the vortex of a pulsing, hard-core science industry neighborhood. Polaroid art & haiku poems already existed there, illuminating brick & concrete walls. I did try to suggest a concurrent world more botanical, more leafy. Even so, wavy vapors drifted upward into a postmodern sky. Agrochemicals & their allies, however toxic, remain invisible to our human eyes. MIT nuke, used car lot, railroad, was taken one block from the MIT campus, just across from Mass Ave. Many others would follow, in other locales, depicting neighborhoods where I worked & where I made slow drives homeward.

Erik: I’ve seen other artists, for example the late Thorpe Feidt, use polaroids to document the daily progression of his paintings as a sort of reference point to return to. Do you return to these polaroids to inspire new work?

Eero: My polaroids were inspired by location & changing light. Some things you can never quite return to.

Erik: Polaroids to me, feel like portals, more so than other photographs. Perhaps this is due to the mechanical functionality of the development pouch and chemical venting built into the frame of the polaroid. Do these photographs feel like portals to you?

Eero: I’m more inclined to turn towards Pound’s instruction: “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Embellishments come by foreign chemistry & perhaps a dusting of datura pollen.

Erik: What poets or poems inform(ed) your photographic process?

Eero: I don’t think so much of poets informing my photographic process although there are a few who do influence how I intend to use words with my polaroids. The poems Anselm Hollo was writing in the 1970’s were an influence. The lines are short, he writes a laconic vernacular that fits the time, commentary is direct & understated, often funny. The following short poem from his book Heavy Jars points to the direction I aimed for:

in the little boy’s head / the hibiscus stands always in bloom / she better get here soon

Robert Creeley was another inspiration for utilizing short lines & understatement. His poem Don’t Sign Anything is a wonderful demonstration of the feel I liked:

Riding the horse as was my wont, / there was a bunch of cows in a field. / The horse / chased / them. I likewise, an uneasy / accompanist. / To wit, the Chinese proverb goes: / if you lie in a field / and fall asleep, / you will be found in a field / asleep.

Contemporary visual artists like Sigmar Polke influenced my photographic process of altering polaroids as much as any poet inspired adding words to image. I first experienced his altered photos in Aperture and later in his installation & book Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish. I love how he distorted images w/unusual developer processes as well as his painting and inking on top of positive and negative film stock. No medium was sacrosanct to his alterations. Images Gerhard Richter was making in the early 1990s were a later influence. His blurred photo-like “Pictures” existed somewhere between out-of- focus photos & imagistic, pastel-muted paintings. His book 100 Pictures was a huge inspiration. There are any number of poets & photographers who combined words with photos. Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Kruger, Mark Klett, Jim Goldberg all influenced my ear & eye. Robert Frank, for me, was the master of combining words w/photos. His montages of large polaroid prints, words scratched on their surface, were direct inspiration to how I worked to pair words w/photos. He got me going with my polaroids. I can point directly to a Robert Frank black and white drugstore snapshot in Jonathan Green’s Aperture book, The Snapshot, where Robert scribbles w/a magic marker above a sunset outside his Mabou Mines fisherman’s shack:

“One evening early March / it’s 6:30 PM 25 degrees / I love to be here.”

Where else do you need to go?

Erik: Do your photographs spawn poems?

Eero: I believe the poems exist independent of my photos. Sometimes there are visual links, like signs that suggest poetic influence. Beltsville, MD #2 is one. However, it would be a stretch to see poems coming directly from the polaroids.

Erik: Is there a particular psychedelic substance closer to this work than another?

Eero: I used to host a large Brugmansia sanguinea plant next to a Banisteriopsis caapi vine in a little solarium attached to the house I lived in during the 1990s in southern NH. The Brugmansia would bloom every summer & boy did it ever put out a fragrance at night. I guess it was trying to attract Andean fruit bats. Occasionally I would collect a few blossoms and dry them. Mixed with the Hopi Pueblo tobacco I grew, the smoke would provide quite a kick. For a few minutes one’s vision field would light up with sparks. When one presses hard enough with the crochet needle into the Polaroid film layers, one reveals the metallic mylar backing of the polaroid film stock. Done with the right touch, one creates the illusion of hot, melting metal within the soft color fields on the polaroid surface. It’s a little like datura physics, like Brugmansia family relations. Maybe an alchemical kinship exists between Polaroid chemistry & hallucinogenic plant alkaloids. For what I see now, those days reside in another time.

Eero Ruuttila / Erik Lomen

2025