Lola Graham
60 × 90 cm — 1200 EUR
L E A D
Photographed in Oxford in August 2025, a couple of minutes after Oxford and on the same street. A handwritten note face up on the tarmac, among dry leaves.
S T A T E M E N T
I collect. Not objects — I look for what has been left somewhere: lost, put out, abandoned on purpose. This note belongs to life, as found, the line that runs through a lot of my work: things in positions nobody arranged for a viewer.
What holds me here is how much the sheet asks and how little it answers. Names, countries, a few words in capitals, a hand that clearly knew what it meant. What is this about. Who wrote it. What did they write it with — I found a pencil lying in the road a little further on, and I have no way of knowing whether it was the same one.
Digital capture. Warm tarmac, dry leaves, and one pale rectangle that is the only flat surface in the frame. The mood I get from it is closer to something mystical than to documentation, and the work was shown in Serbia as part of an exhibition built around Edgar Allan Poe, which fits it better than I expected at the time.
W O R K D E T A I L S
Medium — colour photograph, digital capture
Paper — Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth
Print dimensions — 60 x 90 cm
Image dimensions — 62 x 92 cm
Margins / mount — 1 cm warm off-white mount
Frame / presentation — narrow natural oak frame, Italian moulding
Edition — limited edition – 5 prints
Certificate — individual certificate of authenticity
Exhibition history — Whispers in the Shadows, Bartselona POP UP at Radisson Collection Old Mill, Belgrade, 19 January – 20 February 2026. Group exhibition of nine photographers built around Edgar Allan Poe, opened on Poe’s birthday; covered in the Serbian national daily Politika. Exhibited as Lola Mirmuminova.
P R I N T & D I S P L A Y
Recommended material — smooth matte cotton rag.
Why this material for this image — everything in the frame is matte by nature: tarmac, dry leaves, a sheet of paper. Printing it on a matte cotton surface makes the photographed paper read as paper, which is half of why the picture works. Gloss or baryta put a shine on a sheet that has been lying in the road and break that immediately. Smooth rather than textured, because the handwriting needs the resolution.
Margins and framing — narrow natural oak frame, narrow mount in warm off-white. A bright white mount competes directly with the note, which is the lightest thing in the image and needs to stay the brightest. The palette is warm throughout, so a cool white surround fights it.
Light and viewing distance — neutral to slightly warm, 3500–4000 K. The picture is built on warm greys and browns and takes warm light well; cool light greys the leaves out. It reads from two metres as a composition and from close up as a document — hang it where people can get near it.
Type of space — studies, hallways, reading rooms, anywhere people stop rather than pass. Less of a living-room picture than Oxford: it rewards attention rather than filling a wall.
Avoid — cool lighting.
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