Half of the art is in the frame, right? That’s what a frame store will tell you, anyway. So will Brian Eno and most ad agencies. But I’m unwilling to spend $50 for a nice wooden frame with glass and a custom-cut, museum quality archival matt board to house an 8x10” photograph I paid two bucks for. It doesn’t seem to fit the medium and it’s way too expensive. But I’m equally unwiling to buy one of these and add doubt to my already dubious credibility as a photographer. So I went out looking for alternatives—something cheap that looks good. If I could sell a framed 8x10” print for less than the outrageous $150+ that local photographers demand and probably never collect, I’d have some “art for the masses,” right?

So here’s my approach. For an 8x10 photo, I went down to the frame store and bought a 12x14” piece of Plexiglas, a can of white spraypaint that bonds to plastic, and a can of spray adhesive. Plexiglas comes with a backing stuck to both sides. I peeled the backing from one side, masking taped around the edges and spraypainted the showing side. Then I removed the tape and backing from the flip side, revealing a plate that has the sheen and color of the outside of an iBook. Then I centered and mounted the photograph there with the spray adhesive.

That’s the short story. It took a bit of work to get the tape on and off, to line the photo up, to adhere it straight onto the plastic without a dry mount press and without glue getting everywhere. I also had to sand down the sides of the Plexiglas to even out the rough edges left by the glass cutter. But I did manage, and I think with a little work (and a real dry mount press, a bigger cutting board, and some studio space to house it all) I could start making these frames pretty quickly.

They’re cheap and they look great. My total cost for the 8x10” is a little over $15 for everything. I think people would be happy to pay $40+ for these prints (not Steve Keene cheap, but still cheap), and I get to cover at least the printing and framing expenses right away (the cam0era would take years to pay off at this rate, though).

Here’s a photo of the photos I’ve framed so far: a 16x20” on the left and an 8x10” on the right. I have placed a pen in the upper right so you can get a sense of the scale.

I’m still experimenting with different aspect ratios. I kind of like the “HDTV look” on the left, but maybe with a bit more margin on top and bottom. Meanwhile, the biggest challenge is the hanger on the back: I still haven’t figured out how to hang these things. Hot glue doesn’t stick, epoxy doesn’t stick, and I can’t see how I could drill a hole in the Plexiglas without screwing up the photo. I’ll let you know how it goes…