Instant Gratification

Matt Schwartz has carved a nice little niche for himself in the photography world.

His sunny Park Slope apartment, which doubles as She Hit Pause studios, is littered with props, rolls of film, and Polaroid pictures – lots of them.

Save for a desk and office chair, there's nowhere to sit in the space besides the hardwood floor, which is strewn with feather boas, ladies' tights, spools of thread; really, anything from which Schwartz can draw inspiration.

"Everything from my life, it's like, thrown in a shoot," he said.

Schwartz is a self-taught film expert, as well as a Polaroid and toy camera enthusiast.

He has a drawer, akin to a toy box, full of cameras of all kinds – plastic throwbacks like Lomography cameras and a Holga or two, and several different kinds of Polaroid cameras. Of course, he also has your standard 35mm Nikon SLR, perched atop a pile of cardboard backings.

The one thing you won't find here, though, is anything digital.

Having just returned from a trip to Costa Rica, and preparing for another to the Dominican Republic, Schwartz manages to squeeze in an interview and a photoshoot in late January. Most of his models are friends, and today's model is tall and freckled, with wild curly hair – clearly, he chooses models and situations that stand out.

Schwartz has an appreciation for the bizarre, the unusual; his 'Girls and Dreams' series features women in unconventional, dreamlike situations. There are some nudes, and there is a nod toward voyeurism and fetishism in prints like the geometric 'Stained Glass' and 'Legs and Fire.' The colorful 'Gumball Bath' features a torso in a tub of gumballs.

There are a lot of body parts – legs, especially – in his prints.

“I always like hidden people's faces either with props,” he said. “The reason I photographed her was because I thought she was beautiful and I ended up not even showing her face. It tells more somehow by showing less.”

Schwartz works mainly with large format Polaroids and sometimes slide film. “Everything except digital,” he said.

His main specialty, though, is a Land camera, with which he uses pack film – the kind of Polaroid film you peel apart, rather than the kind that pops out of the front of the camera and develops before your eyes. He then transfers his negatives onto special paper, yielding the signature ragged edges that many digitial media, including the Hipstamatic app for iPhone, try so hard to mimic.

 The prints offered for sale on the She Hit Pause website are Polaroid transfers, using pack film and a vintage Land camera.

He described his process: “I take the picture, pull apart the film [pack film] and then rub the negatives onto water color paper.” This results in those signature ragged edges.

He describes the appeal as the unpredictability of the image.

"Once I take the image I have little to no control over how the image peels. They all come out different. That is the charm.”

Schwartz vacations to the Dominican Republic often, and is learning how to surf. He's actually integrated his loves of surfing and photography, and claims surfing photographers from the 60's and 70's such as Leroy Grannis and Jeff Devine as sources of inspiration. He also has a particular fondness for tropical florals, and of course, girls. In fact, Schwartz has actually met some of his subjects while on vacation: girls, street vendors, a parakeet and a Chihuahua working in tandem. One of his most striking photographs is of a cow relaxing on the beach with surfers in the background, aptly named "Surf Cow."

Between travel and art, Schwartz is keeping busy these days; so busy, in fact, that he needed to hire an assistant to help him ship boxes of merchandise. Soon, he'll also be contributing to a book on Polaroid photographers and techniques that will appear on the shelves of hipster clothing retailer Urban Outfitters.

But regardless, Schwartz stays loyal to the organic, the tangible: his large, sometimes plastic, bulky cameras that yield that soft, rustic quality so popular nowadays. It’s a quality of photography that was taken for granted back in the 1960s, the heyday of cameras like the plastic Diana (which Urban Outfitters also sells), popularized  now once again by the revival of plastic cameras and all sorts of digitial equipment and software attempting to mimic their affects.

"For me, digital…" he trailed off, reaching into his toy-box for a large, gray Fuji Instax camera.

He snaps a picture, and a wide-format Polaroid print pops out. "I understand its place, if you're taking photos just to snap it.”

“But there's such a weight to film," he said. "This photo means something. It can't be deleted."