My friend and photographer extraordinaire Carlos de Spinola tipped me off to a striking set of images from Sean Tubridy recently. It would be a sin of omission to call Tubridy a photographer when he’s in fact a publisher/activist/graphic designer/salesman (that’s where the “buy my stuff” portion comes into play–the “stuff” includes screenprinted shirts with illustrations of Leica M3s and transistor radios, not to mention the self-published book “Toys on Roids” featuring shots of classic and modern toys taken with a Polaroid SX-70). Even given his work as co-founder of the Save Polaroid effort last year, the portion of his body of work that I’m most excited about is an extensive Flickr collection under the nomiker Tubes. Keyboard keys, ultimate fighter figurines, and model cars have never looked so beautiful.
Tubridy, who first got his hands on a Polaroid camera eight years ago, said he’s enamored with “the immediacy, the tactile nature, the one of a kind aspect of them…I like the idea of using a camera and film that was made for more casual purposes and using it for studio shots of these little toy sets I create. I could shoot with a digital camera and edit in Photoshop, but I love the challenge of getting the correct in camera and leaving the computer out of it.”