From Polaroids to Portraits: 50 Years of Storytelling in a Single Frame

Some stories live in words. Others live in images.
Mine? It’s been kinda both.

Fifty years ago, I bought a camera at a thrift shop—not a Polaroid, actually, but a Reflekta. A chunky East German thing with a waist-level viewfinder and a thud of a shutter. I used it at Three Rivers Stadium, trying to capture my hero Roberto Clemente on the field. I didn’t know it then, but that thrift shop handed me more than a camera—it was another way to see.

To frame a moment.
To remember.
To feel something later.

Those early images were raw, immediate, imperfect. That was the point. Life wasn’t curated. It was captured. And it changed me.

Instant Prints, Instant Emotion

There’s something about film—especially instant prints—that a JPEG will never touch. The chemical bloom. The wait. The weight. People leaned in more when they knew it wasn’t infinite. You got one shot. One crack at memory.

Back then, we didn’t post. We passed things around the dinner table.
With fingerprints.
With fading corners.

That’s the spirit behind Reflekta: memory you can feel—not just see.

But here’s the thing: those prints—the ones we loved—ended up in shoeboxes. In attics. In drawers no one opens. They had weight, yes. But also fragility. The scrawled captions on the backs barely survive a generation, let alone two.

Now, when I take a photo, I ask myself:
What will people say when they find this in 50 years?
Where were you? Who were you with? What were you doing?
How did you feel then? How would you feel now?

All those things—context, emotion, story—are in danger of being lost.

As the African proverb goes: “When a person dies, a library of stories and memories dies with them.”
Last year, 62 million people died.
That’s 62 million libraries burned.

From Frame to Brush: Watercolor Enters the Picture

Years later, I found myself staring at a different kind of frame: a blank sheet of paper.
Watercolor became my way to reframe the chaos of entrepreneurship. To slow the scroll. To breathe.

Funny thing? That splashy, uncontrolled medium brought me right back to my Reflekta days.
No “undo” button.
Just flow.
Mistakes baked in—and somehow, that made it truthful.

When we started building Reflekta—the memory tech that lets you hear and see the people you miss—those brushstrokes came with us. The avatars are often rendered in watercolor. Not for nostalgia. But because they feel alive.

Soul Tech Demands Soulful Art

We never wanted Reflekta to just sound smart.
We wanted it to feel human.
That meant leaning into the visual languages that shaped us: the candor of instant film, the warmth of pigment on paper.

Watercolor tells a story without perfect edges.
It bleeds. It blends.
It feels like memory.

What’s Old Is the Future

We’re not chasing photorealism. We’re chasing presence.
That’s the throughline—from Polaroid to portrait… to platform.
Because when someone sees or hears a loved one again, we want them to feel something true.

That’s what storytelling is for.
A least that’s what it’s been for me.