Pulse
The Polaroid Project
A medical student finds a new use for an old camera.
Ben Pederson had a simple idea when he found out he was going to Karatu, Tanzania, to help conduct a health survey in rural villages last summer: To take pictures of the families he’d meet and give them a copy. Everybody deserved a portrait of themselves, he thought.
Pederson, then a second-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, had done something similar when he traveled to Senegal after graduating from Macalester College in 2007. Instead of bringing a digital camera, he lugged along his old Polaroid One 600. When he got there, he found himself taking family portraits and giving them to the people he was photographing. “It was a good gesture, especially for the kids,” he says.
Pederson was excited to try it again in Tanzania. But he had a problem. The Polaroid Company stopped making the film for the cameras in 2008; packs were being sold online at premium prices from a few dealers who had dwindling supplies. Each sheet cost nearly $2—a hefty sum for a student. Then he learned about the Fisch Art of Medicine Student Awards program, which makes grants to University of Minnesota medical students who want to pursue an art project. “I thought, this is perfect.” In his application for a grant to help him purchase film, he explained that because his medical interests and summer assignment focused on maternal and child health, he wanted his camera to do so as well. So as he traveled from home to home, he would take photographs mostly of women and children.
Pederson says the camera served multiple purposes while he was in Tanzania. It kept him busy, for one thing. “When I was in a village, my utility was pretty minimal in terms of interviewing,” he says. It also helped him make friends. But he thinks the photographs serve a deeper purpose because they capture images of children living in a place like Tanzania, where childhood passes quickly and material possessions are few. “Every mother deserves to have a photograph of her children, a captured moment with their treasures, even if it is a simple Polaroid,” he says.
Pederson doesn’t consider himself an artist. But he remains passionate about taking photos with his Polaroid cameras—he now has three. “The thing that really appeals to me about the Polaroid is that it’s very appropriate technology. You’re bringing this thing into an environment in which a digital camera is meaningless. It doesn’t produce anything. With a Polaroid … it [captures] a brief shared moment that you can have with somebody, and it’s immediate.”
Pederson says he thinks his photographs have had an impact on people here as well as in Tanzania because they are a reminder that many people in the world have so little. “There are families who don’t have a simple thing like a photo of their kids.”—Carmen Peota