The first attempt. Failed.

Yesterday I attempted the first real emulsion original. It failed on every level.

First the image would not lift cleanly off the carrier. Then I did not like the composition. The lettering came out far too large. And the attempt to frame the whole thing made it bearable — it did not make it good.

That is exactly what makes this technique interesting: the result is almost impossible to predict. You only know what you have once the emulsion is lying on the paper. And I have a very limited number of Polaroids. Every failed attempt costs one of them.

So I went straight into a second attempt today. That one worked. It is drying overnight, and I hope I still like it tomorrow as much as I do today.

Both pictures above show the first attempt, by the way. There is no photo of the second one yet.

Which leaves a question I had not asked myself before: what do you do with failures like this? Archive them? Destroy them? In my view this one does not belong in an exhibition — there are too many mistakes in it.

What do you think?