The Topology of Physical Media — Dylanger Gutierrez

One of my favorite photo books is not like the others. Timelapse: How We Change the Earth (Grant & Dougherty, 2020) is a massive collection of bird’s eye images showing the face of our world, both built and natural. These images are sourced from airplanes and satellites, and the geography on display is breathtaking. Here’s an example:

An aerial view of a white salt flat with a grid carved into the ground partially filled with bright blue water — Salar de Uyuni lithium mines in Bolivia. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Seeing the world made so small, I can’t help but to imagine what it would feel like to run my hands across the surface. It would be rough and chalky, with scores where your fingernail would gently catch and skip in regular intervals if you dragged it along the grid.

Here’s another landscape for consideration:

White wispy clouds on what looks to be a cracked purple mud flat

The nature of this scene is very different, both in content and construction. I did not take this photo from an airplane or satellite. In fact, this is a crop. Here’s the full context:

A white Polaroid frame with partial spread coverage, so that the top is brown, the middle is purple and white (as shown above), and the bottom is a deep blue. — A messed up Polaroid. Me, 2024.

This frame was the result of a technical mistake; I attempted to use one kind of film in a different kind of camera, and while I was eventually successful, I got a couple frames like this. I scanned them anyway and was instantly reminded of the way the cracks looked like dried out mud flats, and the foamy borders paralleled the waves which batter the shores of the Santa Barbara coastline.

This was not the only dud in the pack. Here’s another incident of random chemical mayhem:

A brown, cracked close-up of another Polatoid misfire

I look at this and think of the mud flats of the Alvord desert, up in southeastern Oregon. I once stood in that place, and took this photo of the cracking earth:

cracked, brown surface of a mud flat — Mud Flat, Alvord Desert, 2021.

Every day, we put the physical world around and within us aside to spend our time immersed in intangible spaces. In this life where everything feels increasingly more abstract and convoluted, I feel rooted in the topology of the media with which I work, and this makes Polaroids truly special to me.