Framing and Displaying More of My Work

I think that there are many important parts of Photography that have been lost in the digital age. One of the more notable is that most work is displayed and seen on a screen. While this has had the obvious benefits of allowing more people to see more artist’s work it feels to me too impersonal and lacking in reality. I have spent my career in technology and spent most of that time understanding semiconductor chip development, software, and markets. In fact my most recent work focused on display technology so I am comfortable and well versed in image digitization and pixels and RGB and bits per pixel and resolution and compression. So this comes not from some fear or misunderstanding of the technology but more from my heart. 

My need to involve more of my senses in photography has extended to other hobbies such as woodworking. There is something immensely satisfying in an activity that involves the brain and the hands. There is such a satisfying and intimate connection between the two. Think about how important note taking is when done with pen or pencil. The connection between the intricate movements required to scrawl words on paper and the brain and the eye seems to cement the information more solidly in one’s memory. Mankind has evolved because of this relationship between the mind the hand and the eye. So extending that to physical image creation is part of that evolved process. 

It is why art and crafts are still so popular even in an age when virtually any material need can be conjured up. Making something oneself is so satisfying. Also to own something made by someone else that reflects their own mind and hands and eye is generally more valued than that which is machine made. We tend to treasure those objects more. 

So this idea is at the heart of the love of my work in the darkroom and by extension of getting that work onto a wall even if only in the gallery of my own home. Recently I have been making my own picture frames. It is surpassingly easy to get frames made for much cheaper than a frame shop by going online. You do have to make decisions and mount the work yourself so there is more effort and certainly I have used frame shops work of special value. 

When I make my own frames by hand I do perhaps save a little money but more important to me is the joy in the creation of it. I think up the design and then bring my tools out to work the wood into what I imagined. I have described this current line of simple frames here... They are made of pine and painted a flat black. They have no glazing as I tend to use textured paper which I want to be more visually apparent.

These next frames I undertook to be a generic square frame that could accommodate different work in that format. The square frame looks great as I explored this in some of my first of this frame series. 

Previous square frame work (8x8 inches) (20x20 cm)

I wanted to be a bit bolder however and expand the amount of whitespace between the frame and the image. I sized the frame to coincide with the Ilford MG Art paper I would use for a lot of the images. The paper size us 9 1/2 inches by 12 inches so I would arrange square images on a 9 1/2 inch (24cm) square sheet of paper I cut from that. The MG Art paper being paper rag watercolor paper has a nice texture that lends itself well to a frame without glazing and the paper itself can become the matte frame for the image itself as well. I would use the same basic set of mounting features a before as this allow me to quickly change out a photo from the frame for another meaning I can maintain a rotation of newer images as I see fit. The wooden frame itself would also be wider as I experiment with different proportions. (I made two actually frames though you will see more photos in frames I am just moving mounted prints into the same two frames.) 

I set about framing a few of my works from my woodlands project. The first I covered in a series of earlier posts about a printing process I evolved I call Physical Split Printing and Toning.  The two I have in mind were the final images form this series of posts. 

Source images

I cut these sandwiched prints to a square crop of the upper portion which allowed me to remove the troublesome lower portion of the image that was softer and lacked local contrast. These are larger images and I had a matte cut for them to fit the frame and image. Here they are individually. They have a classic formality of the bevel edged mattes framing the image. Because the image has a surface transparency they are glossy images. 

 

The next images I printed very recently with these frames in mind and to explore that bolder white space in the framing. As I had settled on the 9 1/2 inch (24cm) paper size I cut my sheets of MG Art paper into squares of this size. My easel is not a four bladed easel and so has limits on the borders it can create at 2 inches (50mm). This would leave a 5 1/2 inch (14cm) square image at the center. This would have to be good enough and I think it works well. 

(I have considered an even more radical 4x4 inch (100mm) image size. When I ordered the cut matt for these prints I ordered 2 additional ones. One a 4x4 inch square and the other slightly bigger. I planned to use these over the paper in my easel to mask the image on the paper.)

The images I chose for this series were from a recent visit to North Yorkshire near the Moors on some conifer woodlands. The first is a mushroom and ferns while the other two are different crops from the same 6x4.5 negative. I was not able to decided which crop I liked better. 

Mushroom and Ferns

Ferns in Tree (Top crop)

Ferns in Tree (Bottom crop)