Project
The Grain Archive, Shown
A photography archive shown at reading distance — vitrines set at lectern height, captions you don't bend for.
The Grain Archive is thousands of working prints — contact sheets, rejected crops, editors' grease-pencil marks — and the show's argument is that the work around a photograph is worth looking at. That argument dictated the design: everything displays at reading distance.
Prints sit in lectern-height vitrines pitched at fifteen degrees, the angle of a page you're actually reading. Captions run beside the object, never below the sightline, set at the same size as the archive's own typewritten labels. The room's only large gesture is the entrance wall: one contact sheet enlarged to four meters, grease pencil and all, so the visitor learns to read the marks before meeting the originals.
Attendance held its numbers; dwell time doubled. People read.