Picture perfect
Students are often moving to new apartments where they focus on finding a good location, roommates and rent rates. Boxes are unpacked and furniture is scrounged up from various thrift stores. But what about the walls? For those tired of the posters-and-sticky-tack routine, photography and framing can remake the look of an apartment.
Andrea Harris, a junior in art, is taking Photography 1 this semester. She said she experiments with portraits, landscapes and animals “in a weird context.”
“Less is more,” she said about finding good subject matter and hanging photography on walls. She prefers simple photographs.
“Odd numbers work really well for groups, I’ve noticed, like threes and fives,” she said. “I’ve seen people with floral stuff, and it always looks better with odd numbers. That goes for when you’re hanging photos, too.”
She said she also likes simple frames, her favorite color being black because is doesn’t distract from the photo.
Blake Bailey, a junior majoring in parks and recreation and also in Photography 1, prefers “random stuff, but mostly outdoor scenes.”
When looking at a potential subject, he prefers lighting, composition and subjects that stand out and seem to have a story. His advice to students taking their own photographs is to look for “what pops out to them, what makes them get the feeling they want.”
Zack Fenton, another student in Photo 1 and a freshman in physics and math, prefers photographing still life subjects.
“I like harsh lighting to get the most contrast I possibly can,” he said. “Your eyes are drawn to the brightest part of the photo, so you want to make sure that the brightest thing is what you want your viewer to notice most.”
About hanging artwork, Fenton said, “I like to hang things up sporadically, so people visiting my place will stop and wonder, ‘Why is that there?’ and think about what it reflects that’s in the room.”
When it came to looking for photographs by someone else, Michael Slade, a second-year graduate student in the photography department, said, “I look for things I would have liked to have done myself. I just found this German engraving of the Great Salt Lake from 1857, and it really represents the work I’m currently doing.”
That work, Slade said, is a photographic survey of the Great Salt Lake that will capture the entirety of the environment and the lake’s many uses, which is also available for viewing at gslps.org.
“Before you are a maker of images, you have to be a watcher of images,” Slade said about photography.
Slade also advises students to save up and get matting done professionally, but if one must mat one’s own images, he said, “The image will decide what the width of the mat will be. It needs to breathe and have a place of its own.”
However, if the image remains silent in expressing how much space it needs, “It’s better to err on the side of too much space than not enough,” Slade said.
The framing department at Michaels Arts & Crafts Store also offers advice on framing. Kelsey Kimber, a freshman majoring in business, has been working at Michaels for four months now.
“The best way to do framing cheap is either to find a frame that fits the photograph or have a mat cut to fit,” she said. “Custom framing is a lot more expensive than just getting a mat cut and then putting the frame together yourself. Sometimes photos look alright without a mat, though, if the frame fits.”
For advice on choosing the right frame, she said, “For color, you don’t want something that distracts from the image or clashes with furniture in the room. When people come in with an image, we usually ask them what kind of furniture they have in that room so we can make the frame not stand out as much.”
Despite basic rules, most people seem to think that anything goes if it looks good to the one decorating.
“Nobody’s holding a gun to somebody’s head to decorate poorly,” Slade said. “If people decorate poorly, it’s their choice.”
Nonetheless, some renters are limited by clauses in their lease forbidding any nail or brad holes to be made in the walls, and for them, it’s about moving on to a photographs-and-sticky-tack routine.
-fayem@cc.usu.edu