Off The Wall: Four Photographers Rethinking The Picture Frame

Despite countless developments and innovations within the medium, since the first permanent photo etching was made in 1822 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, photography has maintained a rather ubiquitous shape. From digital frames to prints of nano images, square prints to panoramas, the medium has remained confined within 90-degree angles and straight borders. Even with given the internet’s penchant for disrupting the norm’, image consumption and dissemination is often still trapped within minor variations on the rectangular, two-dimensional theme.

Perhaps due to photography’s relationship to painting, another medium that generally manifests itself in the rectangular format, it makes sense that this definitive aspect has been overshadowed by the contents that fall within the frame. Painting, however, broke free from the bounds of quadrangles decades ago—see, for example, Richard Tuttle’s octagonal Red Canvas, or Robert Rauschenberg’s painting-sculpture fusions he described as "Combines." Filmmaking, too, has moved from squared screens and onto new platforms through to technological advancements including projection mapping and domed omnitheaters.

So what’s the deal, photography? Why haven’t you caught up?

As it turns out, some of today's finest image-makers have been experimenting with traditional modes of photographic display, eschewing hanging frames, right angles, and two dimensions, and creating nuanced evolutions of photography in the process. On the crest of this new wave, we’ve compiled a list of four contemporary artists who may not identify as photographers per sé, but are pushing the medium into unparalleled new directions— and shapes.

Brooklyn-based Kate Steciw seems determined to break as many photographic conventions as she possibly can, including "hanging" work on the floor, deliberately mounting her pieces at crooked angles, and using asymmetrical, jagged frames. Steciw has stated that she's "Interested in making a photograph move beyond the 2D and exist in 3 and even 4D spaces or implied spaces."

At its core, Steciw’s work is deeply concerned with image consumption and how it relates to commercialization. Her frequent utilization of heavily commercialized stock imagery is a search for alternative ways of understanding the consumer’s relationship with image consumption. In her eyes, "It is in the form of images that we most often encounter the objects of our desire.” Presenting her works in new and often unusual manners modifies the viewer’s experience with what often is previously traditional and familiar imagery.

Boasting five solo shows and group shows at the International Center of Photography, Hauser and Wirth, and Steve Turner amongst others, Steciw’s challenge to photographic conventions are clearly respected within the art world. With essentially limitless modes of creation, Steciw will continue producingworks that challenge our familiar experience of photography.

Myung Keun Koh is a Korea-based artist with sculpture degrees from both Seoul National University and New York’s Pratt Institute. His non-photographic background provides a unique perspective for his works, which intersect architecture, photography, and sculpture with his photographic “boxes."

The three-dimensional boxes provide a physicality unrivaled by standard gallery prints, and Keun Koh uses this to its full potential to give literal depth to subjects like human bodies or buildings.

Since photography already flattens real life objects in two dimensional images, the act of returning these images to 3D is a unique ‘distortion’ effect. Koh's images are works that depart from both the two dimensionality of images and the inherent 3D-ness of real life. They exist in an entirely unfamiliar plane of existence.

Letha Wilson is another artist working with photographic sculptures, but her work totally diverges from Keun Koh. The Brooklyn-based artist embeds gallery pillars with large, undulated photographs in her series Landmarks and Monuments, including images that are partially distorted by the beams, while others obscure the pillars' own visibility.

In her other work, Wilson departs from photographic convention in other clever and simple ways. In Punch the Sky, for example, Wilson literally cuts images into sections and separates the pieces. Other installationssport images with edges that fold inward, revealing other materials within the print like cheesecloth and cement. The work's awkward presentation and nontraditional material subverts expectations of what a photograph is made of. What lies behind the first layer of an image becomes a permanent question in the viewer's mind.

In some cases all Wilson does is wrinkle the print, a simple gesture that reveals the inherent fragility of images in relation to their real-world counterparts. This form of presentation also mocks a culture of image-worship, where images are often more desirable than reality, despite their inherent flimsiness.

Wilson does all of this while maintaining landscapes as her single, consistent subject matter, a choice made because “as a genre [landscape photography] is approached with equal parts reverence and skepticism.”

Despite the prevalence of photographic images in her work, when Hyperallergic asked Wilson if she considers herself a photographer, her response was not absolute:

“I use photography. In a way, I consider myself an amateur photographer. When I went to undergrad at Syracuse, which is where I learned to print color and black-and-white, I was actually a painting major, and in grad school at Hunter I was in combined media. I’ve always used photography in my work in one way or another. Even as a painting major I was doing collages and Xerox transfers, and using imagery from my home in Colorado.”

French artist Aude Pariset has a seeming predilection for the ocean, as he prints photographs onto objects like wind sails, beach chairs, and rice paper shaped into clamshells, in three distinct series.

Despite thematic similarities in the form of her work, the actual subject matter of Pariset’s work varies drastically from project to project. For example, her series len jyan, which includes the rice paper clamshells (as shown above), implements abstract digital images from the defunct media collective Paint FX as source material. Something organic (rice paper) poses as another part of nature (clam shells), and is then printed upon with incredibly artificial digital images—a bizarre interplay of processes and objecthood. Different than our customary smartphones or computer screens, “The clam exterior is used as an interface for the display of digital files," she explains.

Instead of net art-friendly jpegs, Aude Pariset’s printed wind sails from A BōAt[] A Promise use “real” photographs of pharmaceutical company headquarters, a seemingly big pivot to say the least. But perhaps this combination is not quite so odd when one considers the widespread misuse of prescription pills throughout the world. Windsailing, on one hand, is a societally acceptable form of leisure, while recreation pill popping, on the other, is a taboo and dangerous type of fun. The two become one and the same in Pariset’s works, except they're packaged differently.

Alongside various international exhibitions, Pariset has participated in a group exhibition at Toomer Labzda Gallery entitled 2-D Pushers, alongside Letha Wilson and Kate Steciw of this list.

Aude Pariset, Hosted As Seen On Screen: Relags Travel Chair (2012)

These image-making heralds are setting up the groundwork for new possibilities within photography and other forms of art processes. Photography has already made a massive leap from analog to digital, maybe it's only a matter of time until more artists follow these four to make the frame and form of photos evolve, as well.

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