When photographer William Miller stumbled on a vintage Polaroid SX-70 camera for just $18 at a garage sale in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he snatched it up. Once home, he loaded it with film and started snapping pictures. The photos it spat out were a mess—abstract glops of color that could hardly be called photographs.

Miller put the camera away and promptly forgot about it. When the Impossible Projectstarted making instant film for Polaroids, he dug out his camera and tried again. This time, he embraced the blurry images. "I was like, 'There might be something to this,'" he says.

There was, and it resulted in the series Ruined Polaroids.

Letting the camera do its thing, Miller pointed it wherever he liked and waited to see what the machine shot back. "It didn’t really make a difference," he says. "If I pointed it at Kennedy being shot it would still look like grass on the moon."

To process an exposed photo, a Polaroid forces the film through two rollers that burst pouches of chemicals within the white space at the bottom of the film. The the rollers smear those chemicals over the film, developing the image. Miller guesses the rollers in his camera don't work properly, resulting in all those weird blobs and lines.

At some point he tried to repair restore the SX-70, which is a favorite among collectors and can sometimes sell for several hundred bucks. He sprayed WD-40 inside the camera and even tracked down the schematics so he could take bits of the camera apart. Nothing he did helped, and might have made it worse. "I definitely used to wrestle with that thing,” he says. “It was kind of an abusive relationship.”

Over time Miller developed a deep appreciation for the bizarre snapshots, and started using it as cathartic relief. Working as a photojournalist for the *New York Post, *Miller must be careful about how he depicts the people and places he shoots. With the Polaroid, the photos showed "nothing," so he was free to simply depress the shutter. “These ruined Polaroid’s aren’t of anything, and there are so few pictures where that’s the case,” he says.

The project ended when the camera mysteriously started working again on its own. It doesn't take great pictures, but the abstractions are gone, and so is the experiment. “When it started working, that just made the whole thing more endearing,” he says. “So much about all this is just chance.”