Lola Graham
90 × 130 cm — 2200 EUR
L E A D
Made in September 2025 as a personal project, continuing my longer work on the female body — its vulnerability, and its honesty.
S T A T E M E N T
The series was made in the moments when a person stops arranging herself for the camera. She is slightly open, slightly on guard, and still holding her own weight. The vulnerability is not put on display — it sits under the skin as a low tension.
The body carries the story on its own: broken angles, held pauses, the small gestures nobody usually records. Light cuts the figure into planes, closer to expressionist drawing than to portraiture, and the physical form does the work that speech would otherwise have to do.
She keeps control of her own story throughout. She can be hurt and still able to defend herself, and neither cancels the other — that is the part I did not want to smooth out.
I do not resolve who she is. The frame asks you to look rather than to interpret, and the questions it leaves open — where she came from, where she is going — belong to whoever is standing in front of it.
W O R K D E T A I L S
Medium — colour photograph. Digital capture, printed, then scanned and worked into as a physical image; the surface of that process stays in the final file.
Paper — Hahnemühle Photo Rag, smooth matte cotton
Print dimensions — 90 x 130 cm
Image dimensions — 90 x 130 cm
Margins / mount — no mount
Frame / presentation — narrow off-white frame, Italian moulding
Edition — 1 print
Certificate — individual certificate of authenticity
P R I N T & D I S P L A Y
Recommended material — smooth matte cotton rag.
Why this material for these frames — the file already carries a surface. The work was printed, scanned and physically worked into, and that process is visible in the image itself. A heavily textured paper prints texture on top of texture and the two start to compete; baryta puts a gloss over a surface that is matte by nature and contradicts it. A smooth matte cotton lets the existing surface stay the only one.
Margins and framing — no mount, narrow frame in off-white. Photo is built on a large field of near-white wall; a white mount runs straight into it and the picture loses its edge, while a dark frame drops a weight onto a high-key image that doesn’t want one. Let the frame be thin and close to the image’s own tone.
Light and viewing distance — neutral light, around 4000 K, and generous. High-key work needs light: in a dim room the white field turns grey and the figure stops standing in space. Frame I reads from four metres and holds the wall; Frame II wants a closer distance.
Type of space — a wall with some tone in it. This is the one case where a pure white wall works against the print: Frame I’s field is near-white, and on white paint the image loses its boundary. Off-white, warm grey, plaster, or a darker wall all work.
Avoid — dim rooms, pure white walls.
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