Name: Dylan percy

Collection: Polaroid cameras

Number in collection: 48

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I’ve been collecting Polaroids for 8 years and didn’t become a heavy collector until the start of the pandemic. I got my first Polaroid when I was 13, I was helping out with a school fundraiser for our marching band that invited people to donate items and then we hosted a large garage sale, basically a Salvation Army concept. And while helping out with that a Polaroid 600 was donated and I was fascinated with it, I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and the woman in charge of the sale said they probably couldn’t sell it and said I could have it. I still have that Polaroid 600 today and it’s one of my prized possessions.

 I don’t really have an exact reason why I collect it’s a collection of many different reasons. One thing though I hardly hear people discuss in this hobby, because I’ve joined many camera collecting groups and talk with a lot of other collectors, is that when you grow such a large collection there is a lot of anxiety that comes with it, because your collection not only have you spent hundreds of hours on it as well as a good amount of money on it, some of them are so hard to replace it’s almost impossible. So you know there’s additional insurance involved as well as upgrades security systems with cameras because if anything happened to my collection it would be one of the worst things to happen to me honestly. But at the end of the day I still think it’s worth it because the joy I get from it is so much greater than the anxiety. Recently in a job interview I had my collection in the background and it prompted a discussion about my collection and the amount of organisation that goes into it, and when offered the job they told me that my collection left a large impression on them because it takes a lot of dedication and organisation for something like that.