“But the show had arrived before I did.”

On July 29th, Navis Shipping picked up the framed photographs from Eric’s I’ve Been Framed Shop and took them to the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum.

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I wasn’t there when they arrived.

A little later, the museum sent me a full inventory of the work they had received, with photographs and notes for each piece. It was strangely exciting to get pictures of my own pictures. For a few of them, it was also my first real look at the finished framed work. Until then, I had been experiencing the exhibition in pieces.

Files on my computer. Prints at Image Works. Frames at Eric’s. Small 5x7 versions in a box. Notes and layouts showing me (and anyone who would look with me) where everything was supposed to go.

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Now the whole thing was in Saginaw.

When Lindsey (Gehlhausen) and I eventually went up to the museum, the photographs had been moved into the gallery and loosely placed according to where they would eventually hang. Each one was sitting on its own little carpet square. They looked like kindergartners waiting for their assignment.

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Walking around the room and seeing Lindsey respond so strongly to the work really underlined the moment. I knew every photograph. I had spent years with many of them. But seeing them all framed and together in one room and being received, all together, by someone else made the project feel different.

It felt real. There was still plenty left to do. Nothing was finished. But the show had arrived before I did. I’ll always remember walking into that room and meeting it there.

“There wasn’t anything wrong with the new proof. It just didn’t feel like the mood I knew.”

Gabriela Baginski and I have been working through proofs and paper decisions at Image Works for the exhibition. For the color photographs, we landed on Canson Platine Fiber Rag. The black and white work was giving me a harder time.

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I brought in a few prints from my 2014 Scarab Club exhibition, printed by Tom Stoye, so we could compare them side by side with the new proofs. Those prints have always had a particular feel to me. The show was hung without frames, so the texture of the paper was part of how people experienced the photographs (whether they recognize it or not, it is an accumulated impression).

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There was one photograph in particular, the small group on Crenshaw next to the Impala, that made the difference clear. There wasn’t anything wrong with the new proof. It just didn’t feel like the mood I knew and wanted to bring to this exhibition.

Gabby was patient with me while I worked through it, even though changing paper at this stage meant some extra work. We started looking at other options and eventually changed the black and white photographs to Moab Entrada Rag Natural. It’s a matte paper that felt much closer to what I wanted to borrow from the Scarab Club prints.

A few weeks later we printed the full black and white set.

Seeing them come off the printer was proof. Even knowing these photographs will eventually sit behind glass, the difference in the surface of the paper still comes through.

If I didn’t know already, the exhibition is teaching me just how many little decisions it takes to make a whole. Some parts are difficult to know until the right version is laid out next to one that doesn’t feel quite right.

I’m grateful to be working with people who understand this and are willing to keep looking with me until things feel right.