Lola Graham
40 × 60 cm — 900 EUR
L E A D
«Lovers» was photographed in Seoul in September 2024. It is a street photograph, and at the same time one of the most personal images I have made.
S T A T E M E N T
The two of them are sitting on a bench in front of a crossing, turned away from me. Her hand has come up to the side of his head: attention, attachment, the wish to be close. The gesture was fleeting, and I am glad I managed to catch it. Their faces stay out of the picture. What the frame holds is the gesture, and the gesture was enough.
The image belongs to Relative Puzzle, an ongoing project about human relationships — how they show themselves, and how people hold on to closeness in an era where so much of connection happens somewhere else. I keep coming back to the small physical evidence of attachment: what a hand does when nobody is watching it.
Digital capture, muted colour. Almost everything in the frame is grey or off-white — asphalt, road paint, a creased white shirt. The street is all straight lines and repeated stripes, and the only soft thing inside it is that arm. The picture works on exactly that difference.
This is part of a longer study of how people interact, and it carries what I want most out of that study: that people might be a little softer with each other, and a little closer.
W O R K D E T A I L S
Medium — colour photograph, digital capture
Paper — Hahnemühle Photo Rag, matte cotton
Print dimensions — 40 x 60cm
Image dimensions — 50 x 70cm
Margins / mount — 5cm white mount
Frame / presentation — natural oak frame, Italian moulding
Edition — limited edition – 7 prints
Certificate — individual certificate of authenticity
P R I N T & D I S P L A Y
Recommended material — matte cotton rag. A light surface texture is welcome here; gloss and baryta are not.
Why this material for this image — the work lives entirely in the midtones. There is no deep black and no bright highlight in it: greys, asphalt, road paint, an off-white shirt. A matte cotton surface keeps that range soft and holds the separation between very close tones; a glossy or baryta paper adds a sheen to the asphalt and makes a deliberately quiet palette look slick.
Margins and framing — natural oak frame, with a generous white mount. The mount continues the whites already in the picture — the shirt, the crossing stripes — instead of fighting them. A black frame closes the image in and adds a gravity the photograph does not have.
Light and viewing distance — tolerant of ordinary daylight; no directed lighting needed. Reads from three or four metres, because the gesture carries at distance.
Type of space — light walls, living rooms, bedrooms, hallways, waiting areas. This is the opposite case to a dark interior work: it wants an even, unremarkable wall and does not need a room built around it.
Avoid — warm-toned lighting that pulls the neutral greys towards yellow.
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