Single Shot Stories No. 013 – Polaroid Colour Swinger by Ronnie Brandon

This photograph shouldn’t exist. The Polaroid Colour Swinger that shot it is an extinct relic from an era of cheap peel-apart instant film cameras. This one was bought by my mum in late 1978 from our local Woolworth’s in Liverpool and was her present to my dad that Christmas. I remember playing with it as a kid: the fun of blinding myself by firing magic flashcubes into my own face. My obstinate refusal to give up on this defunct Polaroid suggests my early penchant for self immolation continues to this day. More on that shortly. First, a little more about the camera.

The 80 Series Colour Swinger is a rigid plastic, no frills, almost-but-not-quite-square version of Polaroid’s 100 Series deluxe folding bellows cameras. Touting a three element 114mm f/9 Polatriplet plastic lens – scale focusable from 1m to infinity – the 80 Series eschews the rangefinder focusing of its upmarket folding cousins for a red square contained within the viewfinder. Set your lens to 1.5m, fill this square with an adult sized head and your subject is now the correct distance for a portrait.

The nomenclature of 80 Series Polaroids – the Electric Zip, the Clincher, the Square Shooter – always nodded towards ‘70s exotica, and reached its apogee here. A swingin’ time for all, and in colour too! This parlays into the Colour Swinger’s groovy and seductive chocolate brown livery; curiously the exact hue of the ‘78 Mk IV Ford Cortina in which my dad drove us as kids. They really dug shades of brown back in ’78. By 2006, not so much.

In that year Polaroid discontinued Type 88 pack film, orphaning this camera; a fact I was blissfully unaware of when my dad bequeathed me his ol’ Swinger around 2014 not long after my film photography obsession took root. He’d found it up in the attic in its now disintegrating PVC case with the original sales receipt and a half spent Magicube still inside. A dispiriting trawl of the internet ensued. Finding the film gone for years was tempered by discovering the nascent Impossible Project. With a new itch to scratch I bought an SX-70 online and from my first shot of Impossible black-and-white, I was hooked.

For a decade now my dad’s Colour Swinger has sat on a shelf eyeing me with its cycloptic optic, challenging me to find some new way to shoot it. When Fuji FP-100C was still around, I pondered hacking the camera, but its innards were just too small to accept the larger film pack. I tried paper negatives which confirmed the electric eye exposure system was still operational but with a meter calibrated to ASA 75 and paper negs having an ASA of around 3…

So, when Ilford Ortho 80 was released in roll film, I realized I’d be able to cut that to length under safelight. The ASA was about right, but without an empty Type 88 cartridge for a film holder it was impossible to get the film flat making focusing an ephemeral endeavor.

Eventually, I found a still sealed pack of Type 88 on eBay for an acceptable amount of money. It expired in ’76 so I figured I’d probably get nothing from the film, but at least I could use the empty cartridge as a film holder. Breaking the seal on that Type 88, I knew it was a bust. Rust coloured dust poured out with a fragrance akin to a farmyard. This stuff hadn’t dried out, as expected – the chemicals had seemingly exploded inside the foil packaging and eaten away part of the metal film pack.

The answer finally came when reloading my SX-70 in the run up to Polaroid Week, 2024. I stared at a spent film pack in my hand, my spatial awareness superpowers tingling. Why had I never tried it before?

It needed a little persuasion – I had to snap off the plastic flap that acts as a light trap – but the cartridge fit inside the Colour Swinger and the back closed tight. Inspired, I grabbed my changing bag and a fresh pack of SX-70 B&W. Blindly fumbling, I finagled a single sheet into the empty cartridge and wedged it inside the Colour Swinger. I ran outside and fired off a shot. Back in the dark I prised out the cartridge and loaded it into my SX-70. The film would need to be ejected through rollers for chemical spread and development. As I closed the film door, that familiar whir of gears carried an even more heightened sense of anticipation than usual. I gave it a minute then had a peek. It had worked.

A few days later my lady and I drove out to Ruthin, an irrepressibly cute market town on a hill in North Wales. At the bottom of the hill is the car park where my dad backed our aforementioned Ford Cortina into a low wall in 1984 on the way back from a family camping trip that had been beset with peril from the outset. Next to the car park sits an abandoned cafe that once acted as a meeting place for biker gangs on Sunday mornings. My little brother managed to incur their ire when he fed the cafe’s jukebox his 50 pence pocket money – for five repeat plays of Something Happened on the Way to Heaven by Phil Collins – one sunny Sunday in Nineteen Eighty-something.

Like the Colour Swinger, I am orphaned now, but just for a moment I felt my folks over my shoulder as I pulled the camera from my bag to photograph the spring bloom and rows of cottages that wind their way to the bottom of the hill. Sure, the lighten/darken dial needs finessing to find detail in the tulips, and so what if the image is reversed and upside down for lack of a reflex mirror? This photograph should not exist. This photograph is a moment of reconnection. The Polaroid Colour Swinger rides again.

Many thanks to Ronnie for contributing this beautiful photo to Single Shot Stories!

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