Printed Photographs
About how and why is still relevant printing photographs: the process of creating Mass Collective Print Shop.
In 2019 Mass Collective started as a monthly meeting in a pub with six photographers. At the time, we did not imagine that the pandemic would soon move all of our meet-ups, talks and collaborations online. Though we didn’t give up and our first opportunity took shape at ZoomedIn where we curated a day of talks for the online architectural photography festival, keeping our community active and united through the pandemic. We then curated a Virtual Gallery exhibition, launched for the London Festival of Architecture, where visitors could virtually interact with an avatar. While these were ultimately opportunities to reconfigure our boundaries and extend our reach outside the initial group of architectural photographers, we feel it’s now time to go back to do something more tangible, outside the virtual world. Creating a series of prints by the Collective felt like the perfect solution.
The fibrous texture of Hahnemühle Photo Rag
In fact, If you ask most photographers how they would like to see their photos presented to the public, you would find an almost unequivocal answer: hanging on a wall, printed on the finest archival paper, possibly mounted in a sleek frame. This desire is even more relevant in our digital age, where the most common way to look at photographs is on small phone screens. With the “scroll-down” culture slowly transforming the act of contemplating into a mere act of seeing, looking at an actual printed image still retains the power to stop time, allowing the viewer to dive into every little detail of a photograph and appreciate the textured union of ink and paper.
With this in mind, we asked a group of photographers already collaborating with Mass to share some of their best works. From there we started a process of discussion, critique and comparison leading to the creation of Mass Edition Prints, a selection of images that works as a coherent collection, aiming at exploring how humans modify and intervene in the urban and natural landscape.
Every image has been chosen for its individual high quality and expressive power as well as its style that fits in the collection as a whole. These works are produced in a limited edition guaranteeing the uniqueness of each print, meaning that once the edition sells out it will not be produced ever again. The paper that we chose is Hahnemühle Photo Rag, an archival paper with a subtle fibrous finish. Its understated colours give photographic reproductions alike an organic look and feel.
Our print shop also features a collection of Posters with some of the most iconic images from the Collective’s archive. Posters are produced as open editions and offer the opportunity to hang high-quality photography on your wall at a more affordable price. More details about Prints and Posters can be found on our Buyer Guide.
The hope is, in the future, to widen the collection by including more creatives and to support and promote the photographers’ personal projects as well as the activities made by and for the photography community as a whole.