This is the gift I gave my brother for Christmas — it’s the first print I’ve made of Photo 54.

54 is one of those photos that I forgot after I took it.  For many months it remained on disk, in a pool of images that weren’t marked for further consideration.

Every once in a while I take a random look through my “rejects,” and last time I did so, this image stopped me.  Was someone staring at me through the computer screen?  As I looked closer, I couldn’t tell whether there was a person or a mannequin in the suit.

After being so startled by this abandoned image, I decided to make a print.  The discrepancy between “on screen” and “print” is different for each photo: some photos give me a similar experience in both settings, whereas others need to be seen in physical form.  I only realized that eerie 54 was a keeper when I finally held the print in my hands.

The tuxedo is seen from behind a scratched plastic window.  If you viewed this setting in real life, your eye would immediately tell you that the scratches and smudges were on the window, not on the surface of the tuxedo.  And that distinction remains clear when 54 is seen on screen.  One special quality of the print is how two layers of texture get flattened: it looks like to me like an artist drew the tuxedo glove with white chalk and then deliberately smudged it over a drawing surface.  And that’s something I love to explore: how unedited photographs can have a painted or drawn quality simply by virtue of how their elements interact.

54 ended up with the color scheme of an antique photo even though it isn’t antique and hasn’t been post-processed.  The antique look came about naturally and, to my eyes, seems fitting for the subject.

My portfolio has around 100 images as of now, and it’s always interesting to me when a viewer quickly focuses on one among all of those.  (I sometimes wonder: what if I hadn’t taken that one?)  My brother chose this one quickly, with no deliberation, and my whole family helped me frame it on Christmas day.

My friend Dan was the first person to buy one of my prints, around two years ago, and he helped me select the pieces for my recent show, Imago.  Along with a few other friends, he also helped me frame the pieces at a great DIY workshop in Brookline–it took weeks to do all forty-five.   Dan’s print waited patiently in my portfolio book all that time, while other prints left to be framed and new ones came in to give it company.   Today we finally took Dan’s print to the workshop.

One of the things that made Imago possible for me to put together is that I decided on a standard format for all the pieces: 8×8 squares in identical 12×12 frames, and since then I’ve been doing all my work in that square format. Constraints like that make so many things simpler.

Dan’s print is a rectangular piece that I shot sometime after my iPhone phase (more to say about that) but before I adopted the square format and the equipment that I currently use.  There was a little stress this morning in having to decide on a frame style, mat size and color, etc. for dimensions that I’m not used to framing.  In the end I think we came up with something that really works.  Here’s what the materials looked like when we got to the framing table:

And here’s a snapshot of the finished piece:

In the image above, you’ll see an extra black mat at the back of the table–that’s the first mat that was cut, and we didn’t use it, because the opening was a few millimeters to narrow.  One of the most “traumatizing” things for me as a photographer is to see the details at the edges of the photo get cropped by a mat that’s too narrow.  That’s because, in my style of photography, it’s often what happens at the edges that makes the photo “work.”  Dan is one person who totally gets this and so when he saw the details that were being lost he shared in my feelings: “Oh no!!!”  We tried to make the narrow mat work, shifting it around a millimeter this way and that (if you show this staple, then the other one goes out of view, etc.) and finally convinced the folks at the workshop to cut us a new mat.  When the second mat arrived it was just wide enough.  Phew!  The snapshot below shows the “proper” orientation of the photo, as it will hang on the wall:

It’s a photo of a subject that fascinates me: staples on an old bulletin board.  This piece is #55 in my catalog.  I usually give a piece a number when I frame the first print of it–that’s why the number for this one is higher than some of my more recent stuff.

I often recommend placing my pieces at eye level in a place where you’ll see them close up–the close-up perspective matches the vantage point that I’m usually in when I work.  Finding a spot for this piece in Dan’s place was interesting because we discovered it actually looked good in a high-up position on the wall, close to the ceiling, where it could be seen anywhere in the room and where it reflects in a mirror on the opposing wall.