The King Is Dead Polaroids

In the spring of 2010 we were prepping to make our 6th LP, The King is Dead. Of course, making a record is never just the making of the music — we were also clunking heads with our various non-musical creative collaborators, trying to figure out how we wanted to present this work to the world, once it was finished. One only has a vague sense, early on in the process, what kind of shape the creative clay will take so there’s a sort of magical thinking that goes on: what kind of packaging will this music want? What sort of photographs? These are startling questions to ask oneself when, often, the music doesn’t even really exist yet.

One of those collaborators was the very great Autumn De Wilde, a photographer and film-maker. We’d been mixing it up with Autumn since 2006, when she shot us for the release of The Crane Wife. I can’t remember the specific instance when the idea came up — it was definitely Autumn’s hairbrained scheme — but suddenly, while we were prepping to turn a barn in deep SE Portland into a recording studio, Autumn was amassing thousands of Polaroid type 100 peel-apart film cartridges on which to capture the album-making process. It took her a very long time.

Those Polaroids — provided to Autumn by the Impossible Project — ended up being a critical part of The King is Dead’s albums packaging. They were used in the promo video for the album’s first single, “Down by the Water.” They were reprinted in the album jacket and in the hardbound book that accompanied the deluxe set. Many of them were included in that deluxe box set; you might own one of them.

It was a cool thing to do — particularly in 2010, when our lives were suddenly suffused with digital photographs taken on computers that we kept in our pockets. The Polaroids were one-of-a-kind. They could not be reprinted. They could be scanned and shared and made into new photographs, but the original Polaroid was a unique thing.

I was recently digging around in a folder on my laptop when I found a file containing the scans — I spent a little time scrabbling around, taking them in again. I do remember the process being very arduous for Autumn — I don’t think she really grokked just how hard it would be to shoot 2,500 Polaroids. But it was relatively easy for us, the subjects. There are candid shots, there are posed shots. There are shots of use working in the barn-turned-studio on Pendarvis Farm; there are shots of us wandering around the farm’s property. There wasn’t enough time for Autumn to shoot them all while we were recording, so there are shots taken months later in various parts of Portland — at a time when we were likely prepping mixes and readying ourselves for promotion and touring. They are disarming in a way that a set of digital photographs can’t be. They are products of their limitations. Some of them have faded — I own a few where the image has completely vanished, leaving only a glare of pristine white on the emulsion, another layer of temporality added to an already-temporal thing.

Before I go on I should mention that I’ll be appearing alongside former Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at The Evergreen in Portland, OR, on Thursday, August 6 — talking picture books with Mac Barnett, the National Ambassador for Young Peoples’ Literature. Tickets are available now via the Literary Arts site. Come on out!

Anyway, here are a few selections. Enjoy!

Oh, there are so many of them. A couple thousand, in fact. These are just a smattering. Maybe I’ll share more later. You might own one of these — please pipe up in the comments if you do! That is your photograph; there is only one, really. Treasure it!