Photography is a medium with a frame implicitly built-in. The edges of the image isolate a section of reality, and the frame exerts a constant, if unseen, force on our interpretations. Not all images are the same shape, and different formats bring different shapes and image edge ratios.
Hold a small print in your hand and it can quickly disappear into its surroundings. This holds especially for the print with little or no border: with no protective visual buffer, the surroundings come rushing in and the print lost to anonymity.
Give the print some room, some visual, protective space and everything changes. Suddenly the image is contained and exerts its own reality. Our eyes are held much more effectively within the images’ borders and the photographic illusion - that we are looking through a window on the world, or more strongly, that we are occupying that world - holds sway.
This is a matter of aesthetics too. The visual attractiveness of a piece can be given a huge boost when it is placed in a mount (and arguably more again in a frame). I order my mounts online and have them cut to exact dimensions to suit the image. I carefully match the mount colour - and remember different whites have very different ‘colours’ - to the paper colour. A good mount is somehow not noticeable in itself, but surely is in its aesthetic impact.
The only way to appreciate this is to try it. Take an unmounted finished print and treat it to a well-cut mount. Observe what happens: put it on a table, step away from it. Take things further and find a discrete, proportionally matching frame. Try it on the wall. Step away. Return to it. It is my wager you’ll love the image more.
A most delectable patch of grey
I own a print by an established photographer that is framed and displayed in my home. I enjoy this print every day, and it has many virtues. Shot with a large format camera on black and white film, it has a rich tonal range, is pin sharp, beautifully mounted, and is of an uplifting natural scene. The tones are undulating and varied without being brash or overly contrasty. The scene is peaceful and there is a quiet drama to the print that chimes with this.
As a printer however, there is one detail that really excites me. To the top left of the image is a space where foliage gives way to a glimpse of distant mountains. I have never seen the negative, so I can only speculate about what it is actually like, but I imagine that particular area to be pretty dense. I surmise that a straight print would result in a too light patch that would draw the eye undesirably to the edge of the frame (and thus from the image area and its subject matter). I further surmise that a little burning-in is necessary to bring a sense of solidity to the rocks and to shift the tones from empty white or near white to light grey. A light grey that is solid but still light. A grey delicately balanced and finely tuned.
How satisfying that light yet solid grey is! To my eye, with my printer’s speculation (admittedly a projection, but likely, I think), it is a small but hugely important detail that makes all the difference. It encapsulates for me the joy of the printer’s work; the ability to tune parts of an image such that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. The work of greys, of patches and pockets of grey, decided upon by the artist. Not arrived at accidentally, but tuned with intention, decided upon, meant.
A most delectable patch of grey, and a reminder of what a great monochrome medium we have at our disposal, film or digital.