Lola Graham
60 × 90 cm — 1000 EUR
L E A D
«Ballet Shoes» was photographed in Osaka in October 2025, during my second trip to Japan. The picture came out of an accident.
S T A T E M E N T
I came across a group of women of different ages who were, as far as I could tell, on a photo walk together. I joined them almost without deciding to, and we spent the afternoon working through narrow streets. This frame was made there. How it happened matters to me as much as what it shows.
Behind the glass: a pair of pink ballet shoes hanging by their ribbon, and below them a headless dress form in a white collar and a black jacket. The image belongs to life, as found — a line that has been running through my work for a long time: objects left or placed somewhere, in positions nobody arranged for a viewer. Those accidental arrangements carry a light irony. They suggest a story and ask a question at the same time.
Digital capture. Almost the entire interior sits in shadow, and what survives inside it is the collar, the pale wood of the form’s neck and the pink of the shoes. The white stucco on the left and the green of the window frame set the picture’s limits. The whole thing is held inside a window that is already a frame — I didn’t have to build one.
Why is that there. What happened before it. What else is inside the dark of that window, past the point where the light stops. I like that the picture asks and doesn’t answer, and sends you looking instead.
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 — 60 x 90 cm
Margins / mount — no mount
Frame / presentation — narrow dark frame, near-black or very dark green-brown, Italian moulding
Edition — limited edition – 5 prints
Certificate — individual certificate of authenticity
P R I N T & D I S P L A Y
Recommended material — smooth fine-art cotton rag.
Why this material for this image — the picture holds three different materials at once: rough stucco, painted wood and satin. Paper choice decides which of them survives. A smooth matte rag keeps the wall’s grain and the paint’s flatness and holds detail inside the dark interior; a baryta surface gives more depth in the shadow and makes the satin of the shoes read as satin, at the cost of a slight sheen across the whole print. Since the subject here is the arrangement rather than the surface of the shoes, matte is the better default — baryta becomes worth it above roughly 80 cm, where the shadow has more work to do.
Margins and framing — narrow dark frame, no mount. The photograph already contains a frame: the green window set into the white wall. A wide white mount adds a third frame around the second one and flattens the composition’s joke. Let the picture’s own architecture do the framing.
Light and viewing distance — directed, neutral light, around 4000 K. The pink is delicate: warm light pushes it towards peach, cool light greys it out, and in both cases the one colour accent in the frame stops working. Enough light to open the interior, not so much that the white wall blooms. Reads from two metres, rewards standing closer.
Type of space — works on both light and dark walls, because the picture carries its own white. Hallways, dressing rooms, bedrooms, studies.
Avoid — warm-toned lighting.
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