Discover the expressive possibilities of Polaroid photography in this six-session workshop blending image-making, hands-on experimentation, and artistic exploration. Through artist examples, demonstrations, and weekly assignments, participants will explore what makes instant film a compelling medium: its distinctive palette, intimate scale, physical layers, and capacity for surprise. We’ll review camera features and creative approaches while considering how Polaroids can serve as individual artworks, visual journals, storyboards, or the foundation for a sustained personal project.

Working with still life, portraiture, landscape, and nature, participants will explore techniques including multiple exposure, intentional camera movement, ink injection, souping, and manipulation during development. We’ll investigate ways to transform the photograph through painting, collage, stitching, cutting, and writing, as well as emulsion lifts onto paper and objects. Throughout, we’ll connect experimentation with intention, considering how texture, light, negative space, and the interplay of images can communicate an idea or evoke an emotional response.

As the workshop progresses, participants will learn to develop visual stories through sequences, diptychs, triptychs, strips, and mosaics. Group discussions and image reviews will support thoughtful editing and help each artist recognize emerging themes in their work. The course concludes with a presentation of selected images and a discussion of mounting, installation, and exhibition possibilities, giving participants practical tools and creative direction for continuing their own Polaroid practice.

Materials you will need to participate:

One of the new generation of Polaroid cameras: Now+ or the Polaroid i2 and at least 6-8 packs of film (either B&W or Color, but would prefer you have a few packs of each). A tripod is highly recommended and can be a very low-end tripod....nothing fancy required. Simple and inexpensive art materials that you might already have include glue sticks, scissors, any kind of art paints that are water based such as water color, acrylic, water based inks, etc, Sharpie fine point. A box cutter or Xacto knife. A small cutting board or cutting mat. If you want to do ink injections you can order 20 gauge hyperdermic needles from Amazon and some fountain pen inks in several colors. If you don't want to handle needles I will show you other ways of applying color inside the Polaroid with your other paints.

Jari Poulin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the fragile relationship between memory, identity, history, and the photographs we use to remember ourselves. Working across photography, printmaking, installation, writing, and mixed media, she creates images and objects that invite viewers to question what is remembered, what is forgotten, and who ultimately shapes the stories we inherit.

Her work with Polaroid began in the 90’s with emulsion lifts and hand painting Polaroid transfers.  Since COVID, Jari began a renewed interest in working with the new Polaroid cameras and film and has been pushing the boundaries of what can be possible in terms of using the Polaroid film as a medium that can be manipulated, painted on, disassembled and reassembled with collage, and used inventively as a medium onto itself.

Across bodies of work that range from intimate explorations of grief and family history to investigations of women's overlooked contributions to culture, Poulin returns repeatedly to questions of presence and absence. Her photographs become acts of recovery, seeking traces of lives, relationships, and histories that risk disappearing from both personal and collective memory.

Poulin's work has received numerous national and international honors, including recognition from the International Photography Awards, the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris, the Moscow International Foto Awards, the Pollux Awards, International Color Awards, Black & White Magazine, COLOR Magazine, and Neutral Density Magazine. Her photographs and prints have been exhibited internationally in the United States, Spain, France, Ireland, and Australia.

She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design and has served on the faculty of Maine Media Workshops, Santa Fe Workshops, NordPhotography in Norway, Parsons/New School, and she has been a guest instructor and lecturer for numerous other educational institutions and arts organizations.