1This short paper examines my relationship as an artist with the format of my photographic images and the decisions I make about the edges of my prints. It is presented in conjunction with and as additional to images of my photographic work. The format of my work is an integral part of my practice and it is informed by precedents from the history of both painting and photography. As a result, I have been thinking about how and why the photographic edge plays such a huge role in the conception, and hopefully the reception, of my work.

2According to legend and the subject of Johann Michael Wittmer’s Raphael’s First Sketch of the 'Madonna della Sedia’ of 1853, the great master Raphael, being caught unexpectedly in need of a surface on which to capture the scene of a young peasant mother and her children which he stumbled upon in the campagna, was given a barrel top on which to sketch as the only available surface. This apocryphal narrative is used to explain the circular format of his Madonna della Sedia (Fig. 1). Contrastingly, in the history of art, the rectangular picture, whether photographic, painted or drawn, is far more common, necessitating an explanation to Raphael’s use of the atypical tondo format. Pictures are systematically surrounded and contained by the straight edges of the rectangle; they are, in one way or another, framed.

3Broadly speaking, my work explores the physical nature of photographic images and the debt photography owes to historical western European painting. It points to the ‘object-ness’ of an image that originates in a negative that has been exposed in a camera and printed in the darkroom. In a sense, the object is just a piece of photosensitive paper with a front and a back. By folding, drawing with ink, punching holes or overlaying negatives with adhesive stickers, I manipulate the pristine surface of the negative, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the photograph as an object and the image as a construct. By obscuring parts of the image, I aim to trigger a recognition of the photographic process and of its medium. At the same time, all these strategies also point to the format of my resulting images; I don’t simply alert the viewer to the fact that the photograph had a format, which I have now disrupted in some way; I also create a new format all of my own making.

4Rampant and recurrent rectangularity tends to obscure the fact that other formats have co-existed with it. So much to do with vision, for example, turns out to be circular; the eye, the lens, the pupil, the field of vision. It is only when it comes to representing the visible that the format in which this is undertaken has straight edges. It is worth wondering why vision transformed into representation seems to require a change of shape. My own work tends to feature lots of circles: circular edges, the use of circular stickers, circles within squares, circular cuts, circular negatives and re-oriented circular segments of the original image. Some of my most recent bodies of prints made in 2019-20, including A Thousand Falling Petals, Pieces of Sky, Pieces of Water and Entr’acte, are all made by using small circular negative ‘confetti’ scattered on the darkroom enlarger (Figs. 2-8)

7The images of my series In the Beginning mimic that bodily reality by printing a cut and rearranged circular section of negative upside down. These works also allude to the tradition that the act of picture-making is also akin to the act of creation and echo a Judeo-Christian tradition of biblical cosmology. In many illuminations of the middle ages and early modern periods, God’s creation of the world takes place within the circular format of a disc or series of concentric circles, a belief that is beautifully recorded in Giovanni di Paolo’s 1445 The Creation of the World and in earlier illustrations from the 13^th-century Bible Moralisée (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) and in the Nuremberg Chronicle. In this last example the illustration of the 4^th Day of Creation depicts a landscape with a river, sky, mountains and hills, upside down (Fig. 10). Other important narratives of the circle being a shape embodying and containing the act of creative creation is also alluded to in the art historical narratives of Giotto’s O (Vasari 64-65) and in the enigmatic circles at the back of Rembrandt’s celebrated Self Portrait with Two Circles of 1665-9.

8Despite the circle being the default shape of vision, often the format containing the act of creation and used as a symbolic motif for the skill of the artist, images are systematically made within a straight-edged format. The act of making a photograph is always construed within a rectangle; the rectangle of the negative edge, of the viewfinder, of the negative holder in the darkroom. The shapes of the photosensitive paper and their frames are also rectangular. This is perhaps why I almost always insist on including the negative edge, the black rebate, in my final prints in order to acknowledge the edge of the photograph. Whilst photographs are typically constrained within straight edges for all the reasons above, there is no fixed ratio or uniformity in the shape and size of photographic edges. Indeed, photographic paper still typically comes in sizes that echo the original large format of 19^th-century glass plate photography. The ratios of camera frames, of photographic films and of photographic papers are multiple and variable. By including the negative borders in the prints of my images, I am acknowledging their edges, frames and limitations, sometimes even pushing the point home by overlapping interventions over the edges. I see my work in a direct line of historical artists from the early renaissance onwards who included trompe-l’œil motifs in their paintings which point to this desire for their images to spill out of their frames (Fig. 11)

9My works entitled Folded; Homage à Corot (2016), Folded; Land over Sky (2016), Folded; Where two seas meet (2018) and Folded; Lines of Desire (2018) are all made by creasing and folding the negatives before making print (Figs. 12-15). When I fold an image, it is partly a refusal to fit within its determined shape; the image spills over the edges, acknowledging the constraints of the rectangular format and, in doing so, creates fresh areas of white space within the new shape of my constructed image. The simple gesture of folding my negatives and as a consequence, allowing the image to spill outside its constraining edges, acknowledges, challenges and frustrates its format’s edges.