I spent two days photographing a room, and the photographs are now the work
The installation came down in March. Two tons of salvage, a crane, eleven hours, gone. Standard. But I had a photographer in for two days beforehand and now I am sitting here editing 340 frames and I have a problem I did not expect.
The photos are better than the room was.
Not technically. Technically they are fine, maybe too fine, the light did something in the north corner that I never got right with the real fixtures. But they have an order the room never had. You cannot put a camera in a space without turning it into a composition. The room was a place you moved through badly, bumping into things, half-seeing. The photograph is a decision.
And now galleries are asking for the photos and not the work, because the work is expensive and the photos are not. Which is honest, I suppose, but it makes me feel like a man who builds sets for someone else's picture. I have started refusing to sell the prints without the room attached, which is a stupid rule commercially and I am not sure I believe it myself.
Anyone else find their documentation has quietly become the thing people want?
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The frame does the editing for you, that is the trouble. I work in mosaic and there is a version of this: I photograph finished panels flat, straight on, and the photo always looks more resolved than the thing on the wall, because the camera quietly decides where the edges are and flattens all the wobble I spent a month putting in by hand. You spend two days with a good photographer and of course the photos win, they had a person whose whole job was to find the order in it.
What I would watch is not which is better but which one you actually meant. If the room was about moving through badly, then the tight ordered image is a document of the room, not the room. That is fine, it can be its own work, but be honest with yourself which one you are hanging. I have sold photos of mosaics to people who wanted the calm version, and I have had to remind myself the calm version was never the point.
The wobble point is the one that stings. I put it in deliberately, the slight tilt of a tesserae row, and then a flat photo hands it back to me looking like I never learned to set a straight line. So I stopped shooting my own panels for anything but the archive. When a piece goes to a client I tell them come and stand in front of it, because the thing is a wall and it changes as you walk past. A photo is a receipt, not the meal 🙂
The tesserae row is exactly it. I have a version in my own work where the floor was never quite level and I left it that way on purpose, and in the photos it just reads as sloppy carpentry. Nobody standing in the room ever thought that.
"A photo is a receipt, not the meal" I will be stealing, by the way. Though the trouble with my case is that the meal is now in a skip and the receipt is all that is left. So I have to decide whether I am showing the receipt as evidence or selling it as a plate.
The mosaic comparison lands, and it is worse for you than for me because you put the wobble in on purpose and the camera just deletes it. Flat, straight on, and the grout lines become a grid nobody laid.
Which one you meant. I have been chewing on that since I read it. I think the honest answer is I meant the room, but I have spent my whole life making things that only exist because someone is walking through them badly, and the camera is the first collaborator I have had who tidies up after me without asking. Two days of that is seductive.
So the photos go out as the work, but I am writing the caption myself and it says plainly that the room was better than this. Let the picture be good and the label be honest.