“The frames choose
the photographs actually.”
Jefferson Hayman
Jefferson Hayman
In what he describes as “A
reverse way of creating the final product I guess,” the New York photographer Jefferson Hayman uses his hand made antique
frames to determine their contents.
As he told the Sycamore
Review’s Juliette Ludeker “My studio walls are filled with empty, antique
frames. The sizes and various elements of the frame dictate what photograph
will go inside.”
It was while he was studying
for his Bachelor
of Arts degree from Kutztown University that Hayman learned his frame making
skills and appreciation.
As
he explained in 2015 to Siegel+Gale’s Simplifiers blog “When I was back in art school, I needed a job, and I had two
options: a dishwasher, or picture framer. Those were the only two jobs
available and I had already been a dishwasher for longer than I care to say. So
I decided that I would take this job as a picture framer and learn a skill—and
also hopefully get free art supplies, which I needed at the time. After taking
the job, I realized the importance of the picture frame. It’s this DMZ between
the art and the world. It’s that last area, a border basically, between
reality, and the reality of what the artist is creating on the page.”
And within these borders Hayman places his nostalgic styled photographs
that strive for a timelessness aesthetic of simplicity.
About which he says “The more simple a composition, I have always thought, speaks
louder than a more complicated one. There’s a phrase out there: “A whisper is
more powerful than a shout,” that’s something that I think about when composing
work or when formalizing an idea. I think it evokes a sense of contemplation. A
lot of artwork these days doesn’t require that you stand in front of it for too
long. A lot of it is flash and pop-oriented images. But what I’d like to do,
what I hope to do, is to engage the viewer to contemplate my works in hopes
that it stays with them once they’ve moved beyond my artwork.”
Hayman’s current exhibition
Limerence is on show at New York’s Robin Rice
Gallery until the 19th of June.
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