A few weeks ago, I got an email from my brother, who lives, with his wife, in Vermont. At the end of the email was this PS:

“I found a weird Polaroid camera in a local junk shop. It was a Spectra SE. Interested?”

I have been hankering after a Polaroid for rather a while. When the email arrived, I was coming to the end of the Photo Meditations course, during which I had studied the work of many Polaroid photographers, the most recent of whom had been Leah Reich – who takes amazing double-exposures with a Polaroid Spectra. Did I want a Polaroid camera of my own? Hell, yeah!

That lovely brother of mine headed back to the junk shop, bought the camera (which even came with a full set of filters) and packaged it up to send across the ocean to me. When the parcel arrived, I did a happy little dance around my kitchen. The camera was beautiful, thrilling, in full working order, and all the more special because it came -with love from my brother- all the way from a Vermont junk shop.