[Leica] How would you frame this gallery show?

[kyle cassidy on the lug]

So … 

Yesterday I asked a question about mounting prints to gaterboard and about 40 people emailed me privately saying “gaterboard is a crappy way to hang your show”

So … this may require a bit more explanation — my solution doesn’t have to be gaterboard but it does have some requirements.

Here’s the whole scoop:

A year ago, I got this idea to do portraits of librarians. I did, and it was published as a photo essay in Slate magazine. (In fact, it was the most popular photo essay that Slate has ever published):

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/02/11/kyle_cassidy_photographs_librarians_at_the_american_library_association.html <http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/02/11/kyle_cassidy_photographs_librarians_at_the_american_library_association.html>

It has multiple millions of views, tens of thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook … it went everywhere, but only to people who have Internet access, some of the people who this photo essay was essentially FOR wouldn’t get to see it — one of the things that librarians pointed out again and again is that a lot of their constituants don’t have access to the internet, which is one thing that makes libraries so necessary …. so based on this, and the huge amount on controversy it generated (and like SERIOUS FIGHTING IN HERE):

http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/781095.html <http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/781095.html>

I began a crowdfunded campaign to photograph MORE librarians -- ultimately I photographed and interviewed about 350 total.

One of the things that I promised was that after doing this there would be a free gallery show that would tour the country and that libraries could hang for no cost apart from being responsible for repacking it and mailing it to the next library after it had been up for a month. I’d learned that many libraries are operating on less than a shoe-string budget and that there were hundreds, if not thousands of libraries that wanted to hang the show. So … these set of prints would basically be on tour until they were all stolen, lost, or destroyed.

For that reason, I want to keep the cost of mailing them as cheap as possible and I want to keep the hanging options as simple as possible, in this case, museum putty that just goes in the box. I had good luck with this method in my show “Leaving Dakota” (http://kylecassidy.com/projects/dakota/ <http://kylecassidy.com/projects/dakota/>) which toured the world in a shoe box.

It seems that the easiest, and least expensive way of doing this is to make multiple copies of the show, printed on gaterboard, that just get mailed out; libraries hang them, pack them, and mail them to the next one on the list.

The criteria are:

1) The images look nice.
2) They’re cheap for libraries to mail.
3) They’re easy to hang.
4) They’re easy to hang in non-traditional gallery spaces.

They should also be not expensive to produce since I want to make about ten copies of the show (each featuring about 20 prints) so they can tour simultaneously. 


So … that’s the long story.

If you have ideas about how to do it (canvass mounting? indestructible light frames?) ….

Thanks for your advice and expertise,

Kyle