Presentation

The vast majority of the content on photography sites centres around using a camera, post-processing, printing, and image critiquing. But inevitably if you've made some photographic prints you also need some way to show them – hence this article.

Mats and framing

In my tutorial Matting and Framing Crash Course I show how to do these tasks, but it's been a few years now since I've actually done this. If I want to frame a print these days, I take it to my local frame shop who are kind enough to give me a "wholesale" price for anything in the area of 16x20" to 18x24". If I just want some mats, same thing. I do an ever-mutating assortment of my own prints framed and hanging in my home at any one time. These are in modular metal frames – mostly 16x20s 18x24s – and I have a collection of increasingly ratty mats with varying aspect ratios to fit. For this reason I try to compose and crop my images to 3x4, 7x10, or 2x3 aspect ratios as much as possible. I've experimented with showing 1/4" of paper white around the pic and flush mat and am now leaning to the latter, but that's purely personal taste.

I no longer cut my own mats because the inexpensive mat board cutting tools just don't work for me: I can't get a straight inner cut longer than about a foot. And my volume is too low to justify a table-mounted cutter. When I retire I may spring for the tools and get into cutting my own mats and even making my own frames just as a hobby. But at this time, if I needed to do a set of framed prints and didn't have access to a local framing shop willing to cut a deal, I'd look for frames and pre-cut mats in standard sizes on the Internet, then size and crop my pictures to match.

Probably the biggest question and the one I feel most people get wrong is mat colour. I know there is this (literally) hoary tradition of white or off-white mats for photography. It goes back to the days of universal B&W, but even then it was just wrong. Kodak even did a study on this at one point to determine the ideal mat colour and came up with 18% grey. Which is also wrong. The problem with white mats is that they darken the image by contracting one's pupils, and in typical gallery lighting that's even more of a problem than in a well-lit home. The problem with grey is that – counter-intuitively – it clashes with most colour images and is the wrong value for most B&W images.

Let's start from first principles. The reason to have a mat at all is to separate print from glass, preventing adherence. Since there needs to be a mat it may as well add some visual value, and what it can do visually is separate the print from its visual surrounds (usually the wall on which it hangs). At least that's the usual theory. I'm not sure most pictures clash with most walls. Perhaps a better idea is that the mat and frame act like a ta-da and drum roll introducing an amazing stunt at the circus. However, there are intros and there are intros. The era of ornately elaborate gilded frames has come and gone (at least, everywhere outside museums). There is now generally a concensus that mat and frame should not call attention to themselves nor distract from the viewer's experience of the picture. In this regard a simple white mat and black frame would seem to be admirably suited ... were it not for the problem of image darkening just mentioned. Some images are fairly insensitive to this problem; and the larger the image area compared to the mat area the less it matters. But if the art world has to settle for a single universal mat colour, my candidate would be black.

Fig. 1: mat colours

In the perhaps slightly more aesthetically astute world of framed painting repros the standard for mat colours is to match one of the predominant colours in the picture. The problems here are to avoid choosing an assertive colour that makes the mat attract attention to itself (the green or ochre mats above); and to avoid a colour that turns the mat into an extension of the picture (the brown mat above). So we can refine this approach by adding that the colour used should rhyme with the image but should be muted (de-saturated) and should be either darker or lighter than the overall brightness of the picture itself. For my pictures I use a dark or light olive, a dark or light blue-grey, and black. For Fig. 1 I'd use the dark olive or black. I've shown the above to several non-artist, non-photographer friends with no explanation other than to ask them what mat colour they'd choose if they were having this picture framed. So far the favourite is the brown, with olive coming in second. All singled out white as one of the colours they would be least likely to use, along with the ochre.

Portfolios

Fig. 2: 11x17: portfolio (Pina Zangaro Frost)

This is where nearly all my energy goes. Framed prints have problems: sheer expense, glass glare, and the need to enlarge the image sufficiently for distant viewing without compromising its goodness for close viewing. I now focus almost entirely on developing themed portfolios, which I think of as being prototypes for bound picture books.

A serious downside to the portfolio is dealing with mixed landscape and portrait orientations. The closer your typical aspect ratios are to square the less this is a problem. If you have a pretty even mix of portrait and landscape there's not much choice but to use a square page or to segregate landscape and portrait into their own portfolios. Another issue is that paper white becomes the mat colour; but at least the viewer has the option of moving to a better-lit location.

The standard sleeved portfolio is no better than glazing when it comes to seeing a print. Both darken the image while reducing Dmax. For personal use I've come up with a simple un-sleeved portfolio. For formal use there are cover-and-post options available, for example: Pina Zangaro. In both cases one has to think of the print as being semi-expendable. There's no question that edges will tatter with continued use; with any kind of care it's a very slow process; and with a good rag paper slight wear could be considered a form of antiquing. ;)

Page size is really dependent on the complexity of the subject matter and the comfortable viewing distance of the viewer. For me, a 6x9" or 7x10" image area on letter size paper is so small that it trivializes even a moderately complex image (just as web presentation does); the viewer has the tendency to flip through complexity and subtlety in favour of in-your-face simplicity. For a person who does primarily simple, iconic images, letter-size pages might be fine. I've settled on 11x17" with 3/4 inch or larger margins as being a reasonable compromise between image size and portability. I've read that 8x12" is considered some sort of standard for professional photography portfolios. If so, content would have to be chosen accordingly.

A similar option is a simple boxed set of loose prints. There tends to be more wear on loose prints, but this option has the significant advantage of drawing in the viewer by the sheer physicality of handling the prints.

Bound books

I have no personal experience with this. Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has explored both custom binding of one's own inkjet prints (very expensive but very nice, lending itself to the limited edition concept) and commercial vanity press repro books (the repro quality is never going to be in the same ballpark as one's own prints).

Another retirement project for me will be to learn book binding and produce limited editions of my themed portfolios, although the necessity for what looks to be fairly expensive gadget called a press gives me pause.