ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers the parergonal frame more literally as a material structure, such as the photographic mount, which has been used since photography’s earliest days, like a frame, defining the boundaries between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic and augmenting a perceived lack in the otherwise ‘naked’ photographic print. Perhaps more than any other aspect of photographic materiality discussed up to this point, the mount is seen as extrinsic, most notably in the sense that it is not an organic component of the print. As art historian Paul Duro suggests of the picture frame, the author reveals how the mount ‘serves to create a space for the artwork that the work in itself is incapable of furnishing’. When scholarship has moved away from conservation and has been focused more specifically on photographic mounts, it has centred on photographic collections in libraries and archives, where the images in question are treated as historical and/or ethnographic documents.
