To blur the boundaries of photography, a Gibsons-based artist learned to strip back the layers of a nostalgic form of image-making.
For Allie Bartlett, whose show, Photographs and Footprints concluded this week at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, the faint click of a vintage Polaroid camera is only the first step in a developing process. After the film reveals its image, she submerges the print in water and separates the emulsion from its chemical and cardboard layers.
“You can pretty much put a Polaroid emulsion lift on anything that you can put into water,” said Bartlett.
For Bartlett, the “anything” includes archival paper, pressed flowers, and even the flat face of a sawn-off birch log.
Bartlett’s debut solo Sunshine Coast exhibition was hosted in the gallery’s newly opened Joe’s Lounge space (named for Gibsons bon vivant Joe Peters). It was her first solo appearance since a 2019 exhibit at the William Morris Hunt Memorial Library in Boston, where she obtained a degree in Fine Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. In 2022, she displayed a selection of her black-and-white floral prints alongside paintings by Olga Chnara at the Gibsons Public Market.
After amassing a collection of four antique SX-70 Polaroid cameras, Bartlett saw a way to test their capabilities while indulging her love of the Sunshine Coast backcountry.
“After a really long winter, I said I had to get outside every day,” she said. “As the flowers started blooming, it was a really good way to incentivize this, going hunting for flowers every day and testing out the four different cameras.”
In May Flowers, Bartlett arranged traditional Polaroid prints in calendar formation. Portraits of rhododendrons, buttercups, lilacs, waterlilies and more are rendered in the medium’s subdued hues. Sometimes the film jammed and streaked the image, leaving only amorphous shapes and hints of colour. Polaroid chemicals are sensitive to temperature. In the field, some practitioners warm prints against their bodies to achieve pinker tones.
“I don’t like to waste too much and obviously with some of this older equipment you do have to decide if you want to be a technically perfect photographer,” Bartlett said, “or if you’re going to lean more into being creative with some different flaws, which I do really enjoy doing.”
With works where she has extracted the emulsion from the rigid Polaroid frame — like her Bonniebrook series and Horizon —, the translucent images can be stacked atop each other, or blended into one contiguous landscape. In Pebbles, three frames are superimposed, presenting a form of time travel where the viewer experiences three moments simultaneously.
Bartlett collects miniature samples of foliage which she dries and presses for up to a year in thick books (“I’ve heard that you can quickly do some stuff with a microwave,” she said, “but I had no luck doing that”). Natural elements — like fern fronds or peony petals — each adorn a paper-mounted emulsion print that depicts their original location. The sublimely delicate composites are rooted in Bartlett’s first-hand knowledge of Coast geography.
“Based on people’s questions, you can learn a bit about them as well,” she said. “Some people will recognize all the different waterfalls, and some people will say, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen that on the Coast.’ But [these places] are all our hidden gems around here.”
Select samples of Bartlett’s photography and emulsion lifts can be viewed on her Instagram channel at @alliesgallery.
