Polaroid Messages

What do you want to do before you die? A simple question that can elicit a variety of responses, and perhaps a question we all ask ourselves at one point or another. But what happens when people are asked this very question as their photograph is being taken? It was this question Brooklyn based artist Nicole Kenney decided to ask when she started the Polaroid photography project “Before I Die I Want to…” with then partner KS Rives. According to Nicole, the project aimed “to urge people towards thinking about and fulfilling their life goals by asking them to make a promise to themselves and to the photographer.” (www.beforeidieiwantto.org)

The beginning seeds of “Before I Die” were planted when Nicole was a young girl. Losing her great aunt proved to be a “very impressionable experience.” She explains, “I think I've always just been really sensitive to impermanence.” It was this thinking about how little time we all have and what we want to do with it that later led to the actual idea when her grandfather, who was “an artist,” passed away. Nicole had his Polaroid camera and soon the idea took root.

Her good friend KS Rives “owned a gallery in Chicago” and knew how much Nicole liked taking photos with her grandfather’s camera. Nicole recalls Rives telling her, “Polaroid's about to be extinct, it's about to be discontinued, let's do a gallery show and invite some other artists.” With the Polaroid camera working itself as a symbol, the two decided to base their project “on death.”

For Nicole, the project became a passionate idea. “We had to go forward and ask all these people, ‘what do you want to do before you die?’” And because “it was important to get them in the moment, not just take smiley, happy photos,” they asked participants not to tell them their answer until they were taking their photo. “We'd hopefully capture something in the moment they were saying it for the first time,” Nicole clarifies. From there they’d have the person write down their answer directly on the photo, like a promise.

At first the project started closer to home. Since they wanted to find a range of people, they began to “ask people in the street like…the UPS man.” Eventually, the project grew past their New York and Chicago locations. “At some point we thought it would be really cool to go to India and ask people literally halfway around the world that come from a totally different culture.” And they didn’t stop there. With Nicole’s “sensitivity to death and impermanence,” they brought the project to hospice. She thought it would be “super amazing,” to take time to “sit and talk with people who had a very finite amount of time left and ask them what was important to them before they die.” From America to India to hospice, they asked “as much of a range of people as possible of all ages and races and men and women.”

One of the most interesting responses Nicole remembers came from a woman in hospice. “She said she wished she was 20 years old again so she could marry her second husband first.”

“She was a character,” Nicole reminisces.

But it’s really the more common responses that have stayed with Nicole. “I remember women saying they wanted to have a baby, people saying they wanted to write a great novel…or they wanted to travel to amazing places. A lot of people said they wanted to be happy or they wanted to live before they died,” she says.

However, while the project “celebrates common humanity,” Nicole discovered that the answers differ around the world. “In America the people we interviewed tended to be wealthier so they had different dreams. In India people might want to own a shop or get on an airplane…a lot of the kids wanted to study.” She could “sense a difference between socio-economic areas.”

The answers that came from hospice were also different. “We’d sit with people for like an hour at a time and have these long, wonderful conversations....They'd be thinking about dying, like they would think ‘I don't want it to hurt,’” Nicole recalls.

Today, while Nicole is no longer actively working on the project, she says that everyone can still be involved. “I think people can do it on their own…people can ask each other,” Nicole explains. She reveals how “amazing” it is to be the one doing the asking. “You get to know the core of someone else versus the small talk you usually have like, ‘Where do you live?’ ‘What do you do?’ Like, ‘what do you want to do in your life before you die?’”

You can find out more about the project at http://www.beforeidieiwantto.org as well as more about Nicole at www.nicolekenney.com.