I stopped photographing my work on the wall and started shooting it on the studio table
For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct.
Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead.
Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks.
I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation.
The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.
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Baby, this is the truth. I've been piecing quilts going on sixty years and for the longest I'd have somebody hold them up flat against a sheet, trying to get them square and correct for a picture. Never looked right to me. Then my granddaughter snapped one of a quilt laying across the back of the couch with my scissors and a spool of thread sitting on it, and that's the one folks kept asking about. Turns out people don't want to see the work alone. They want to see where it lives, what made it. The tools are part of the story. Keep shooting that table, honey.
Sixty years of quilts and the picture that landed was the one nobody arranged. That says something about what we are actually photographing when we photograph work, no? The sheet was never the problem really. The problem is the sheet pretends the object has no life before the frame.
I print, and I keep the registration marks in the shots now. People ask what the little crosshairs are. Then we talk about how the thing was made, which is the conversation I wanted anyway.
The crosshairs thing is good. The sheet's real job is to make the object look like it arrived from nowhere, and registration marks are the opposite of that. They're proof it had a life before you pointed a camera at it.
I keep the glue pot in frame for the same reason. People ask about the pot more than the piece, and I don't mind.
Sixty years of quilts is a long time to be told to hold them up against a sheet. I like that your granddaughter just took the picture. The couch one sounds like it was never trying to be a document of the quilt, and that is probably why people asked about it.
The scissors and the spool do more than the grey card ever did. They say what the thing is made of and how. I keep finding I leave the glue pot in frame now even when it isn't needed. It just looks wrong without it.