Ways To Exhibit

While investigating the different ways and possibilities of exhibition lots of questions are coming up:

What does the height of the hanging object do with the spectator?
What is the difference when you can walk by easily, when you have to look up to it or even crouch to see it?

What if it's unreachable or covered with a layer you have to look under?

Here you can see my first test. I also wanted to know what certain kinds and colors of paper does to one photograph. Well, it's hard to find the perfect paper/color to fit all photographs. One should definetly consider these things individually for each photograph. This can be hard though, if you have a series with pictures which are quiet different to each other and you want to present them in the same way. Luckily this is not my case. About the height: it's all about emotions. If you want to make something look fragile, you could consider hanging it lower than the average eye-height of a person. Then the person can look "down on it" and feels empowered. If you hang it higher, so the spectator has to look up, you turn it around. The object becomes more powerful than the spectator. If you want to keep it neutral, you can choose the average eye-height to hang things up. But there are so many aspects to consider. What I just said, doesn't have to be the case. The surrounding space, the wall, the spectator himself could change it and of course emotions differ from person to person. These could just be some guidelines to help deciding about the height.

I liked the result of the layer-test. I put a chalk-paper on top of one photograph, so you can see vague colors underneath, but you cannot really see, what it is. To see the photograph clearly, you have to lift up the layer, which makes you stand very close to it. That creates intimacy and a special experience. You're the only one to see the small picture at this moment.

I went to Tetem I, an exhibition place near my school, to see how they put their objects on the wall. I was very pleased to get an answer I was hoping for to get. I was happy to see, that different objects with different formats and different colored frames, look so well together. They were placed on different heights, too, but it was no problem at all, in fact - it made it much more pleasant for me to discover all the works, I didn't get bored and also it wasn't too obvious, that the height was challenging me, which fit the works very well.

Furthermore I went to see Carla Kogelman's photography series "Waldviertel".

Beautiful black and white, documentary photographs of children. They differed in sizes and ways of combination, but had all the same way of presentation. They were all on a thick foamboard, which was placed on the wall with a distance-block. So the photo had a distance of 2-3cm to the wall, which caused a subtle shadow. The photographs had no frame at all, which I think fits very well to the subject of the photographs and they were hung up slightly above avarage eye-height, which definetly made the children look more powerful. A different way of presentation could show the same children in a very fragile state.