Big Shots from the Apple.

Oblivion’s efforts at photography were pretty pathetic. I suppose when you’ve got severely limited resources something’s got to go. With one exception, we either used snapshots or pretended we were doing something better when we weren’t.

The most unusual results came from the Polaroid Big Shots that Roy Langbord and I had a brief infatuation with in 1974, and ended up as a bunch of the studio photography for “Blues From The Apple.” The Big Shot was a portrait only camera with a fixed focal length. You needed to physically move the camera back and forth a few feet from the subject to bring it into proper focus! As was always the case with Polaroid there were a number of film options, including color, black & white, and, interestingly, black & white negative film, unusual for a consumer Polaroid.

The camera itself looked pretty unusual. Take a look at it here.

Andy Warhol made the Big Shot famous (with some) when he used it for a series of silkscreens he made in the 1970s.