Here's What Happens When You Put Instant Film in a Microwave

A German photographer made a name for himself by treating his photos like last night's
leftovers

Oliver Blohm and a friend were snapping instant photos at a Berlin beer garden when they had an
idea. What if they burned the photos with lighters as they developed? Their experiment wasn’t
entirely frivolous, though they had consumed a good amount of Berliner Weisse. They knew the
chemistry behind photography and that applying heat would alter the development process. Sure
enough, the lighters created unique textures and spots on the photos and left them curious

Over the next few weeks, Blohm, a 26-year-old photography student from northern Germany,
continued experimenting. Instead of lighters, he used his flatmate’s microwave oven. After some trial
and error and nervous questions from his flatmate, Blohm had perfected the method.

“This is how Oliver works,” says his friend from the beer garden, Michael Fischer. “First he has a spark in
his mind and one or two months later he has this great idea.”

They trick was protecting the images from getting too hot and bursting into flames, which Blohm
accomplished by inserting them between thick paper and a layer of glass. The resulting prints were
beautifully discolored and warped. “It’s about the destruction,” Blohm says. “I wanted to play more
and more with the texture, with the burns, with the flares.”

The film he used came from The Impossible Project, a startup that has been creating new instant film
for old Polaroid cameras. Polaroid discontinued its film in 2008.

“There’s a history of people manipulating instant prints,” says Brenda Bernier, chief conservator at
Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. Products like those sold by Polaroid and The Impossible
Project are easy to manipulate because they contain complex layers of dyes and chemicals. “They
are a technological marvel,” she says. “It’s essentially it’s own dark room.”

Blohm isn’t concerned about the dangers associated with his method. “Photographic processes, the
coolest from the old times, are mostly dangerous and poisonous,” he says. For daguerreotypes,
popular in the mid-1800s, photographers had to heat up mercury. The collodion photography
process from around that time produced dangerous vapors.

The science behind Blohm’s method is simple, according to Philip Sadler, director of the Science
Education Department at Harvard. “Whenever you speed things up, things become uneven,” he
says. “You get different colors, you get burns, discoloration.”

James Foley, who worked at Polaroid as a chemist during the heyday of instant film, says they
designed the material inside the film to react at a certain time. “By heating this up,” he says, “you
could release things before all of the photographic chemistry was done,” resulting in those artistic
flaws.

Earlier this year, Blohm went pro with his microwave photos. He hired models, who sat there as he
dashed over to the microwave and worked his magic. Blohm titled the series “Hatzfrass,” his German
translation for “fast food.” When The Impossible Project opened a store in Berlin, they invited him to
exhibit the series. He even brought a microwave so he could nuke other people’s photos. Since then,
“Hatzfrass” has gained the attention of bloggers. Some fans have even sent him their own
microwaved images. Still, amateur photographers might want to play it safe. “It’s not gonna go
nuclear,” says Ken Foster, a bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “but you might
need to have a fire extinguisher handy.”

100 Years After Her Death, Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon, Still Resonates

The famed bird now finds itself at the center of a flap over de-extinction
In the fall of 1813, John James Audubon was traveling by horseback to Louisville from his home in
Henderson, Kentucky, when he saw an immense flock of birds coming straight at him. Audubon—
pioneer, frontier merchant, peerless bird artist and the creator of The Birds of America— stopped to
witness one of the greatest natural spectacles ever seen.

The birds swept overhead from one edge of the sky to the other. “The air was literally filled with
Pigeons,” Audubon wrote. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in
spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of the wings had a tendency to lull
my senses to repose.”

When Audubon reached Louisville at the end of the day, the pigeons were still flying, their ranks
undiminished. The banks of the Ohio River in the city were crowded with men and boys shooting at
the flock, and dead pigeons were piled at their feet. The flight continued through the night and into
the next day—and then the next.

And then they were gone. Only a century after that flock passed through Kentucky like a hurricane,
the last passenger pigeon died in a drab cage at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Her name was
Martha. Today, she resides, in taxidermied form, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History, where she is on view through October 2015 in the exhibition “Once There Were Billions”—
accompanied by specimens of three other extinct avian species: the great auk, Carolina parakeet
and heath hen.

Passenger pigeons were handsome birds, half again the size of a mourning dove. Males had gray-
blue backs and wings, with a copper-colored breast, while females such as Martha were a duller
version of this.

In spring 1860, a flock of passenger pigeons estimated at more than 3.7 billion flew over Ontario. The
largest documented nesting of passenger pigeons occurred in Wisconsin in 1871: An estimated 136
million breeding birds covered some 850 square miles of forest. Roosting passenger pigeons often
landed in sufficient numbers to shear limbs from trees. But by 1890 passenger pigeons were an
unusual sight in the wild—they had become a prized food source, hunted relentlessly, shot, netted
and burned out of trees, for a huge commercial market. By 1900 no more than a handful were
reported.

The clearing of Eastern forests was another factor in their extinction. Another possible explanation for
the rapid demise was that the bird had evolved to live and reproduce in large colonies. When their
numbers were reduced, even though there were still many passenger pigeons, breeding success
declined. Predation—by humans or natural enemies—had a greater impact.

Martha never lived in the wild. She was probably born into a captive flock at Chicago’s Brookfield
Zoo (her mother may have earlier resided in the Milwaukee Zoo). Martha was later donated to the
Cincinnati Zoo. In 1900, these three populations were essentially all that was left of a species that may
have made up as much as 40 percent of the North American bird population.

Recently, Martha has become the unlikely heroine of a new debate that seems to come out of a
science fiction novel. A handful of naturalists and molecular biologists believe that we could one day
undo what happened by re-engineering the bird’s genome from preserved specimens and a closely
related extant species, the band-tailed pigeon. De-extinction has been proposed as a way of
bringing back a number of vanished species, including the woolly mammoth. But it’s the passenger
pigeon that is currently getting the most attention.

Some conservationists worry that this approach, ironically enough, could undermine efforts to
maintain endangered or threatened species. Where’s the urgency to save a condor if one could
simply recreate the species later? Other scientists argue that it will never be possible to restore an
extinct species whose habitat has been permanently lost.

Yet many researchers believe that what we might learn from resurrecting a passenger pigeon could
ultimately pay big dividends. Jonathan Coddington, the Smithsonian’s associate director of science,
is among those who see benefits. “This work is an interesting technical challenge,” Coddington says.
“And it’s certain that genetic engineering is going to aid conservation and biodiversity efforts in the
coming years.”

Because avian behavior results from a mix of genetics and the imprinting of parental actions, no one
knows how a re-engineered passenger pigeon would learn to be a passenger pigeon. Perhaps the
birds would be little more than a genetic approximation of their extinct relatives, unable to survive in
the wild. “A passenger pigeon in a glass—even if possible—would still be just a passenger pigeon in a
glass,” says Coddington.

The “next” passenger pigeon, if there ever is one, might lead a life not so different from that of the
last of the original species. In her final days, Martha lived alone. Her wings drooped and she
trembled. Keepers had to rope off her cage to prevent visitors from throwing sand to make her move.
She died in the early afternoon of September 1, 1914. Her body was packed in ice and shipped to
the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned and mounted.

According to Smithsonian curator Helen James, Martha represents all that is valuable in nature.
“Extinction is not always something that happened in the remote past and in some faraway place,”
says James. “The passenger pigeon lived right here, in North America. And in Martha we have
something unique: the very last known individual of her kind.”

The exhibition "Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America," produced by the
Smithsonian Libraries, is on view at the National Museum of Natural History through October 2015.

Amid the Heated Debates, Iraqi Immigrants Struggle to Make a Living in Arizona

Familiar fare—qeema, biryani, dolma—offers comfort to the thousands of refugees starting

life over in Phoenix

Perhaps you’ve bought pita bread at the supermarket? Dry, flat: a kind of envelope for holding food.
Now imagine something more like a beautiful down pillow where food could rest and relax and
dream big dreams.

And you’ve probably never tasted a samoon, a diamond-shaped Iraqi bread, because, if you had,
you’d have moved to Phoenix so you could live within smelling distance of the Sahara Sweets
Baghdad-style bakery, which is in a strip mall next to the Iraqi halal butcher and the Iraqi grocery
store. A samoon, hot from the wood-fired oven, is like a popover that you can really sink your teeth
into. It wants hummus the way pancakes want maple syrup.

Can you wrap your mind around a tray—a huge tray, the size of a pool table—that’s nothing but tiny
squares of baklava, a giant grid of honeyed puff? There are eight or nine of these trays at Sahara
Sweets, just waiting for the moment when Iraqis across the city get off their jobs and race to the
bakery.

If you’ve got these images in your head (or in your mouth), then perhaps you can imagine a secure,
prosperous Iraqi community under the Arizona sun. There, sadly, you’d be wrong. Thousands of
people are making a new life here, but Iraq is just about the most traumatized society on earth, and
Phoenix is not exactly easy on migrants, and it all adds up to a real struggle to gain a foothold. Which
is why food is such a refuge.

Meet, for instance, Ali Mohammed. “Just like the champ, except backwards,” he says, clenching his
fists above his head like a prizefighter. He’s a genial, round-faced 34-year-old who went to work in
2003 as an interpreter helping the newly arrived U.S. forces train the local police and army. “I was the
human device between the Americans and the Iraqis,” he says. “At first it was very normal, but after
about 2004 it started to get dangerous. You were riding in the Humvee with the Americans, and the
people thought you were a traitor.” U.S. soldiers issued him a Glock pistol, but he didn’t carry it. “I’m a
Muslim,” he says, “and I know everyone has a last day for his life.”

The last day for his job was August 3, 2006, when his father was executed by militants. “They attacked
him because he was an effective man. A preacher. And because of me.” Mohammed applied for
permission to come to the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granted to those in
danger because of their work with coalition forces. “America let me down for a long time by not
letting me in. I might have been killed anytime.” Finally, in 2013, he received his visa and joined the
growing Iraqi community in Phoenix. “I was thinking the U.S. was going to be much better than Iraq,”
he says. “It’s a good place to have freedom. But it’s hard to have a new chapter. It’s not a place to
be sitting in your chair and chilling out.”

Mohammed was eager to work. After his stint as a translator he’d been a high-school English teacher
in Iraq—he was one of the few recent arrivals we met who spoke the language fluently. Even so, the
local resettlement agency in Phoenix wanted to get him a job as a hotel housekeeper. “I told them I
could find work myself. I have the Internet so I have the world in my hand.” He got a job at an
Amazon warehouse, which he liked—but when the Christmas rush was over, the job was too. The U.N.
High Commission for Refugees hired him to ask people on Phoenix street corners for money to support
other refugees around the world. “And people couldn’t even give cash—they had to give you their
credit card number. So here was a fresh guy stopping people in the street and explaining to them
that there are millions of refugees around the world that need your help. The first week I got one
donation. The next week I failed to get any. So now I’m looking again.” (Since we saw him this spring,
he’s been rehired by Amazon on a temporary basis.)

It wasn’t just that business is slow. This is Arizona, with one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the
country and a sheriff’s office last year found guilty of systematic racial profiling. And it isn’t just the
locals who can be hostile. Sometimes it’s other Iraqis “who say to me, ‘What are you doing here? Get
back to your country.’ I call all these people the dream stealers, the dream thiefs,” says Mohammed.
There are days when he’d like to return, and if Iraq ever got safer he might—“but I’m not going back
with empty hands. At least I’ll get a degree.”

With his English and his Horatio Alger pluck, Mohammed is far luckier than many other arrivals. Therese
Paetschow, who helps run the Iraqi American Society for Peace and Friendship (the organization
changed its name after its old offices were vandalized the night after 9/11), says unemployment is
common and “mental illness is epidemic—pretty much everyone who gets here is fleeing something
horrible, and when you hear that a bomb killed 20 people in your hometown, it brings it all back. And
there are so few resources. There are no Arabic-speaking psychiatrists or counselors in the area—the
resettlement agencies have counselors for victims of torture, but they’re maxed out.”

If you prod almost anyone in the Iraqi community here, you get the same kind of story. When we met
him, Falah al-Khafaji was running a small restaurant, the Al-Qethara, on one of the city’s endless main
thoroughfares. It’s a little dark inside, and cool in the desert heat. “Two of my brothers were
executed, and a third one got killed with a bomb,” he says. We eat some of his juicy shish kebab,
and he shows pictures of his three children, including twins born in 2011. “What is alive has to be
continued,” he says. “They give me hope and the power to keep going.”

“Optimism is not exactly an Iraqi value,” says Paetschow one day as we drive to a halal butcher shop
stocked with goat and sheep head as well as beef grown on a nearby ranch run by Iraqi immigrants.
“If you live in a place where there’s no evidence things will change, you get better at acceptance.
You hear the word inshallah all the time—‘if God wills it.’ That’s how the majority approach things,
even the Christian refugees.”

And yet the stories of sheer grit and perseverance are overwhelming. Jabir Al-Garawi, who founded
the Friendship Society where Paetschow works, came to Phoenix early, in 1993. After expelling
Saddam Hussein’s military from Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi people to rise up
and overthrow their dictator—but those who tried received little support and were brutally
suppressed by Saddam’s forces. Al-Garawi, a freshly minted college graduate, was one of the
fighters who managed to escape, walking seven days across the desert to Saudi Arabia, where he
lived in a refugee camp for two years. He was one of the first Iraqis transplanted to Phoenix, the city
chosen by the U.S. government resettlement program, where over time he set down roots, building a
small real estate agency. When the second Persian Gulf War began in 2003, he went back to Iraq as
a consultant to the U.S. government, only to watch the American mission change from “liberation to
occupation,” with all the chaos and violence that followed. So he returned to Arizona, and now he
does his best to make life easier for the new arrivals. “They’ve seen so much trauma. Many women
are single mothers—their husbands and brothers have been killed. It’s hard for a woman to find a job,
because of the language, but also because she wears a hijab, a head scarf. But if she takes off the
hijab to get a job, then there’s trouble at home.”

That may explain his eagerness to introduce us to two of the Society’s new employees, Fatima and
Fatema. Fatima Alzeheri runs the youth program; Fatema Alharbi is the women’s coordinator. Each is
bright-eyed, each is full of energy and each has overcome an awful lot. Alharbi’s dad had once
worked in finance and accounting in Iraq before he came to Phoenix, where the only work he could
find was as a security guard. Her first month in an American school, in fourth grade, she was riding the
bus when a boy pulled off her head scarf. “I didn’t know what to do—I couldn’t speak any English. So
I pulled off my shoe and I hit the boy, and then I hit the bus driver because he didn’t do anything.”
And then she went on to do what you’re supposed to do, excelling at school, excelling at college.
Alzeheri came to the U.S. later, in eighth grade, knowing little English. “In high school I applied for so
many jobs—in the mall, in shops. My sister said, ‘Look around, do you see anyone else at the cash
register wearing a hijab? That’s why you aren’t getting a job.’” But she did, eventually, working at a
Safeway supermarket before heading off to Arizona State University. She’s a wonderful artist—several
of her canvases decorate the Society—but she switched majors halfway through school. “Doing art I
thought, ‘What am I doing for the people?’”

What she’s doing for the people today is helping the other Fatema coordinate a big potluck lunch.
“Food is like a second language in Iraqi culture,” says her colleague Paetschow, who adds that
communal feasts are almost the norm. “Extended families eat together, and during Ramadan, if
you’re going over to someone’s house for the iftar meal that breaks the fast, it’s probably best not to
eat all day even if you’re not Muslim. Because they are going to fill your plate, and you pretty much
have to eat it.” Despite that tradition, “there’s no real word for potluck, because that’s not how it’s
done over there. Usually it’s someone hosting. There’s not a woman I’ve met who isn’t comfortable
cooking for 50.”

Lined up on long tables in the room at the Society usually reserved for English lessons, there’s now pot
upon pot of Iraqi delicacies. They come from regions whose names are familiar to Americans from
the war news in recent years. Mosul was where Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a gun
battle following the U.S. invasion. Today, it was the source of kubbat Mosul, a flat round disk of bulgur
wheat and ground beef. Nasiriyah is where the U.S. soldier Jessica Lynch was taken prisoner in the first
hours of the war; on this day, though, it was the home of a fish and rice dish that—small bones be
damned—couldn’t have tasted sweeter. The biryani came from Baghdad; the dolma—grape leaves
stuffed with rice and meat—came from practically every corner of the country. In fact, all parts of
the region, given that the map of the Middle East that we know now is a 20th-century invention.

Our favorite—both for the taste and the story—was the qeema. A little background: The neighboring
Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala were not just the scene of pitched battles during the recent wars.
They are important pilgrimage sites for Shiite Muslims, and the site of huge annual gatherings that
mark the martyrdom of Husayn ibn ‘Ali in the seventh century. American TV viewers have seen the
throngs that descend on the city’s mosques from across the Shia heartlands of Iraq and Iran, but also
the impassioned self-flagellation that some men engage in, cutting their backs with chains till they
bleed. The mullahs frown on that display, but everyone endorses the custom of nazri, providing free
food to pilgrims. And of all the dishes, qeema is the most traditional. It’s usually cooked by men, in
huge vats—they mash chickpeas and beef for hours till it’s the perfect mushy consistency. Think
cinnamon-flavored barbecue. Think delicious.

“Those who have in mind the generic Middle Eastern fare of hummus-falafel-tabbouleh-kibbe-baba
ganoush and so on will find that Iraqi cuisine is kind of differently oriented,” Nawal Nasrallah, the
author of Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine, explains
when we get in touch with her to ask how Iraqi cooking differs from other Middle Eastern cuisines.
“For one thing, and irrespective of differences in ethnicity or religion, region or even social status, the
Iraqi daily staple revolves around the dishes of rice and stew, what we call timman wa marga. White
rice (or sometimes steamed bulgur in northern Iraq) is usually served with a tomato-based stew
cooked with chunks of lamb on the bone and a seasonal vegetable. One day it would be okra,
another day it would be spinach or white beans or eggplant or zucchini. The uninitiated would call
the Iraqi stew ‘soup,’ but in fact it functions as part of a main course in the Iraqi daily meal.”
There are rich historical roots to much of the cuisine. One of the world’s first known “cookbooks” was
written on cuneiform tablets by ancient Iraqis around 1700 B.C., Nasrallah says. And marga, she
notes, was cooked by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians who once inhabited the area.

***

It’s not that anyone forgets the obstacles they face when they sit down to the food. We turn to the
man to our right, Saad Al-Ani, an engineer who left Iraq in 2006 (“Why? Because they put a bullet in
an envelope and put it under my door”) and resettled in Syria, only to have to flee the violent
uprisings there last year. (“Everywhere I go there’s a war,” he says with a sad smile.) He’s trained as a
general engineer, used to working on huge projects across the Persian Gulf—he helped build the
massive palace for Yemen’s dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. “But they won’t accept my certificates here
in America, so maybe I’ll teach math,” he says, almost with a sigh. But then he digs into a torpedo-
shaped dumpling filled with ground meat, and for a moment that sigh is closer to a smile.

Across the table is Jabir Al-Garawi’s 11-year-old daughter. She’s lived her whole life in the U.S., and
her favorite TV shows are “Lab Rats” (a trio of bionic teens living in a California basement) and
“Kickin’ It” (lovable misfits at a strip mall martial arts parlor). She’s all-American in her head scarf, and
she’s also scarfing hummus and pita.

“Food is like home,” says her father. He’s remembering his trip to Iraq to help the U.S. government
after the American invasion in 2003. “I went to the military base, and I saw Jack in the Box. I said to
myself, ‘It’s like America, let’s go there.’ When you’re away from home, you want to eat what’s
familiar.”

Which is why, on the day of the potluck, when the ever-present TV at the Iraqi American Society for
Peace and Friendship broadcast the news that 34 people had been killed by bombs back home, the
food brought comfort and Arizona seemed a pretty good place to be.

Four months later, as the terrorist group ISIS threatened to destabilize their homeland, Phoenix
seemed even better. “Ninety-nine percent of us still have family in Iraq, and we’re worried about
them,” Fatema Alharbi says when we call to check in. Her own father is there, and safe for the time
being, but even so. If she hadn’t had to work, she would have joined the crowd that recently
gathered on Washington Street—Sunnis, Shiites, Christians—to protest the violence and ask the United
States to intervene. “No one wants terrorists to ruin their country,” she tells us.