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Polaroid Emulsion Transfer
Use photos to turn ordinary objects into
works of art. BY TY NOWOTNY

Emulsion transfer is an interesting photographic technique, a blend of photo manipulation and object decoration all rolled up into one weird process. The best part: you can put photographs in the most unexpected places. I’ve put them on glass bottles, wood, ceramics, and even metal.

In a nutshell, an emulsion transfer is where you remove a photograph from the paper it came on, and put it on something else. Of course, you can’t just do it with any old photo; you need either Polaroid 559 or 669 or Fuji 100C film, all of which are used in the obsolete Land camera, or in a Daylab slide printer. This is the same film used in the transfer technique described in CRAFT, Volume 08 (“Polaroid Transfer-mations,” page 122), but the end results are very different.