Although Polaroid is as instant as digital, its magic is unsurpassable. Digital upsets people in many countries. For them, it’s all about electronics, computers and the like. Well, in other words just another high-priced good from the First World…

Taking Polaroids of the people and get them to watch the image appearing before their eyes as if by magic was so intense! We were also able to instantly hand out prints to people. They absolutely loved it.

There are now Polaroid pics hung on the blackboard of a small classroom in the village of Phou Luang Tai in Laos, near the fire-place of a Tibetan house high in the mountains of the Nepalese Himalaya, or catching the sand dust in a Bedouin cave of Petra.

Little by little, I think that taking polaroid helped us to understand what we were looking for travelling so much. It’s all about sharing the emotions of the moment. To find ourselves in different universes, meet new people, dive head first into a new atmosphere…

…after all, travelling, like photography, is all about magic.

If you missed them, check out all the ‘Polaroid postcard’, ‘Love from …, xx’.

The Polaroid project was almost put to an end in Syria.

Eve was shooting with the tripod and the big camera in the souks of Damascus.
I was holding the Polaroid camera.
That was probably too much, too suspect, so that a friendly guy asked us why and what we were taking pictures of…

He was probably intrigued by this big black square box that I was pretending to be a camera! Really, how could you make such big camera nowadays without even a giant LCD screen? Rubbish…

What a nice bloke I thought, but Eve was smarter and of course, the friendly guy happened to be an uncover cop or intelligence official.
Luckily, he was satisfied that we were not some kind of political journalists threatening the national security of Syria.

The Polaroid camera was safe and we could take some nice shots, turning sepia with the heat of the Palmyra desert. Almost some kind of orientalist drawings of the XIX century…

Slowed down by an extreme heat, blurred by a heavy dust and drenched in colors during the Holi festival, the Polaroid camera was facing its biggest challenge so far…

Located in a crumbling building, the New Delhi post office was a ramshackle of small offices. I managed to buy some stamps and stuck them on the Polaroid pictures, thanks to an old toothbrush floating in a random kind of liquid glue…

Getting them franked was another challenge! All the post office officers, including the manager and supervisor in chief, had to approve it. After many questions and hesitations, the Polaroid pictures were finally stamped and franked (in a messy way though)! Alleluia!

Lao kids went just crazy with the ‘magic camera’… Check out the full story of the Polaroid project in Laos here and here.

It was still sticky hot in Cambodia but somehow the Polaroid camera was now working almost perfectly!
Getting the Polaroid pics stamped and franked at the post office of Siem Reap was surprisingly easy, with no need of instructions in khmer.

Meeting the monks in Cambodia with the Polaroid camera is sure to be a highlight of the trip.

They were so friendly we had a chat for almost one hour. It was such a surprise for them when the Polaroid film went out!

Meet the monks Smean Samon and Mao:

It was so humid that the Polaroid camera was starting to encounter some serious difficulties. ‘Instant camera’ you said? Well, 15 seconds at least were now necessary to eject the Polaroid film…

Not that practical for a portrait, except maybe this awesome self-portrait: hmmmm, let’s see what’s wrong, nothing’s coming out? oh merde!

Thankfully, the camera sometimes managed to find some extra energy to pull out some pics.

We also managed to get some instructions in Vietnamese, so the stop at the local post office was a breeze (once I understood how to queue Vietnamese style: do not wait your turn in line, rather rush to the counter on the side and be the first to draw the attention of the post office lady).

After the Polaroid Project experience in Russia, we were expecting similar difficulties in China…
Thankfully, the weather was ‘a bit’ less freezing and snowy, nothing really that the Polaroid camera couldn’t handle.

Getting a stamp in a local post office proved to be a nightmare…

Hopefully, but we found some old/fake Mao stamps at the flea market. Perfect to give an old retro charm to these Polaroid pics!

We were so excited with the success of the Polaroid Project in Japan.
We thought that it would be the trickiest country to get it done. But we were still to experience the Russian post office…

Always complaining about the service or the wait at the French Poste? Well, don’t try to send a letter in Russia…

Dark days with very little sunlight, frozen temperatures… obviously the Polaroid camera was not built for the Russian winter! We managed to get one decent Polaroid snapshot though, the iconoc St Basil’s Cathedral, on the Red Square, Moscow.

We even managed to get instructions in Russian for the local post office:

But after a 1 hour wait in a post office unchanged since the Soviet days, 2 forms, an airmail stamp, an envelop and a parcel, we had to give up…

We could only get a stamp, but no date, no Russian official stamp….

Love from Moscow, Russia, xx (almost)

Instructions in Japanese for the local post office to explain the Polaroid Project !