Whether or not you hang the exhibition yourself this should
be a very rewarding moment when months of preparation
fi nally pay off and the work suddenly looks at its very best.
It’s a time for being careful and precise but also for double
checking that all the decisions which have been made work
in practice or, just possibly, recognizing that a decision needs
to be revisited and changed. The most important element
here is allowing enough time to do this well.
THE ACTUAL HANG
Before starting to hang the work, you need to keep a few
guidelines in mind:
• As his rule for photography, photographer David Steen follows the carpenter’s motto
he learned as a teenager: “Measure twice and cut once.” This is true of hanging
photographs. The secret is in the preparation: good preparation saves you time; get
it right and you are fi ne. If you fail to check your measurements at every stage, you
will still be in the gallery at midnight fi lling the holes you drilled in the wrong
places!
• The fi rst rule of hanging an exhibition is not to hang the work too high. This is a
mistake often made by fi rst-time exhibitors and tall people. The standard height for
hanging exhibitions is much lower than you would expect. One reason to keep photographs
low is that while tall people can bend their knees to be at the right height
to look at the image, small people, people in wheelchairs, and children simply cannot
see above a certain height. Most exhibitions follow a hanging-line height of about 5
feet 1 inch, or 155 cm. The hanging line is an imaginary, invisible line that runs
around the space at this height. You use this as a central line in the exhibition along
which the main visual emphasis of the exhibition is focused and on which the images
are centered.
The hanging line is not to be confused with the vertical alignment you select when
hanging a single row of photographs. When hanging a single row of photographs
you need some method of making the row cohere. You can choose to line them up
at the top, at the bottom, or through the middle. If all the frames are the same size,
the row will look neat but if, for example, some images are landscape and some
portrait, you need to decide on one of the three options. As a general rule, lining up
the middle of each frame is pleasing and looks less regimented than if the images
are aligned at the top or bottom (see illustration, fi gures 3.3A–C on page 120).
• Do not hang photographs right into both sides of a corner or your audience will
be bumping into one another and this will break their concentration. Most people
leave space on both sides of a corner, but it is possible to hang work into one side
if you have to and leave the other side free of images. However, if the corner is an
outside corner—that is, if hanging work to the corner leaves the edge of the frame
at or protruding past the edge of the wall—then do not hang work to the
edge because it is too vulnerable; someone passing by may bump into it and
damage it.
• When planning the hang, the positioning of the captions must be preplanned.
Because captions are small, it is very tempting to leave them until after all the images
are installed. However, in a close, tight hang it may be diffi cult to place them consistently.
An inconsistent placing of captions (when, for example, one image has a
caption underneath it and the next has a caption to one side) not only looks obtrusive
The Actual Hang 221
222 Hanging the Exhibition and the Follow-Up
and messy but distracts viewers from the work because they have to think about
fi nding captions instead of concentrating on the images.
• In many buildings, particularly older buildings, the fl oor and walls may have shifted
very slightly out of true. So during the hang it is very important to constantly check
what you are doing by standing back and looking at the work from a distance. If you
rely on a spirit (or bubble) level for a straight line and work close up to the wall on
which you are hanging the images, it is perfectly possible to hang an entire row of
photographs that are perfectly lined up according to your level and then step back
and discover that from left to right they appear to vary very slightly either up or down
the wall. Even a deviation of a tiny amount from one side of the wall to the other
will be very noticeable. If you step back from the wall and check from the middle of
the room after each picture has gone up, then you can make small adjustments as
you go along. This is one of the times in a hang where it is useful, and usual, to
get several people to have a look. At the end of the day, you have to trust your visual
sense rather than the spirit level.
• For most exhibitions with a set of images that are to be regularly spaced, you also
need to decide before starting how much space to allot between each image. This
is another task usually best done by eye. For a single line of photographs, it will
usually be somewhere between two and six inches or fi ve and fi fteen ce