Affordable way to present my photos

Hello fellow photographers,

This fall i have started a bachelor photography at the local arts academy. And in about 3 weeks i will be presenting my work and progress of the last semester. The thing is i have been doing some experimenting with mounting my prints, which has been terrible so far. I will be presenting about 20-30 prints in total, which will have to be mounted on the wall of a classroom. Being a student and all i can't just invest in 20-30 frames. So i have been trying to use double sided photo tape to stick the prints to the wall, which doesn't work well at all. The surface of the walls are so rough that the tape just doesn't stick.

So really i would love to hear about the experiences you guys have had with cost effective methods of mounting? I know IKEA for instance sells these strips you can use to mount prints to the wall, but i don't find that to be the prettiest solution. So any ideas would be really welcome

This is always a tedious situation. Rough walls and double-sided tape are problematic. I'd say the next step up would be to use the tape to mount the prints to cut pieces of foamcore, then hang that on the wall with whatever you have (and are allowed to use) -- nails, hooks or whatever. I believe there may be stick-on hangers or eyelet pieces that could be put on the back of the foamcore, but one could improvise with gluing or taping on a small tab of mat board with a hole punched in it.

(Even using cheap glazed frames throws the project into big money, based on first hand experience.)

Famous British Master Printer Robin Bell made an exhibition at his home/Gallery and simple hung the prints using bulldog clips. Inspired by this another photographer chose this form of presentation and posted examples on his blog. http://jamortram.co.uk/blog/165451688/
It looks quiet good and isn't expensive at all.

Good luck

What size and paper type are your prints? Are they in passe-partouts? And what is the material of the wall? A very simple and yet pure and beautyful method: put your prints in passe-partout and put them on the wall using pins, needles or very small nails. Even galleries and musea use this method.

i hate to suggest drymounting or cutting window mats,
that was always a solution for a long time ...

is it a series that can be hung together in a book form ?
you could get an enormous sheet of paper and accordion fold it
and make a string of image on each opposing fold .. with each pair of images
that have to do with eachother working together as a tiny "grouping"
( you could maybe wheat paste the photographs on each sheet of paper .. wheat paste is reversable by soaking in water )

good luck !
john

When my son had an art show in high school, we made a handful of simple matt board look-alike's using ordinary poster board and tape.

Cut the posterboard into pieces the size of the frame you would want to fit, maybe 11x14 inches. Half of them will be the matts and half will be the backs.

Cut windows in the "matts" - it will be real easy because it's thin stuff and takes one swipe of any kind of art knife. Tape "matts" and backs together along one inside edge and fold over to hide the tape.

Now you only need a little tape to hinge the prints inside the matts and tack the result to the wall.

Cheap, simple, effective and easy to make many of them.

When you get tired of the cheap look you can move up to real matt board and beveled cuts. But for school, unless the assignement requires cutting a real matt, it will probably show your work effectively.

Wow, thats a lot of suggestions already. Thanks! Indeed even when using the cheapest sort of frame at say €5 a pop you're easily talking about 150,- in total.

The prints are mostly series of say 4-5 prints, which together form a story of sorts. Most of them 20x30 or 25x30. A few bigger ones. So it might be interesting to use Johns idea, especially cause the book idea will emphasize that they are meant to form stories. I still got a few very big sheets of thicker painting paper somewhere, so that can finally come to use Otherwise i really like the idea of bulldog clips, its cheap but looks a lot better then prints taped to a wall

I think Ansel Adams mentioned a method where a small board was mounted against the wall and dry mounted prints were simply put on that board. Not sure about your exhibition area, but maybe something like that can be realized.

Lars

I just purchased from freestylephoto.biz a box of Lineco 1.25 inch Self-Adhesive Polypropylene Mounting Corners 250 count - Clear (Full View Corner) and some hinge tape. The biggest problem I have is no way to flatten my prints. But if your prints are flat already, then you could, for the duration of the display, get some 11x14 mat boards cheaply enough for 8x10 prints or A2 size, and this box of corners, and mount away. You could then mount, say the 11x14 sized works onto a large display board using the hinge tape with T-hinges. How you will fix all this t0 a rough surfaced wall is a whole nuther matter, but at least it won't be destructive to your work. >michael