I have recently been helping students install their Degree Show exhibitions. With one student working across printmaking and photography, we removed the glass from a number of frames. The decision was partly practical—reducing reflections—but also a deliberate shift of emphasis. Without the barrier of glass, the surface of each print is exposed. The paper can be seen more clearly. The image sits differently: intimate, vulnerable, yet more resolutely present.
Some of the works are unframed lino prints: black ink on black paper. The imagery does not present itself immediately but emerges slowly, depending on how the light falls, how close one stands, and how long one looks. The printed surfaces vary, at times matt, at others reflecting a rich lustre and, on occasion, an enticing inky sheen. The paper is not simply black, but a range of blacks—charcoal, lamp, midnight. While these qualities are often subtle, the shifts in character invite and reward close, nuanced attention.
The work offers itself to the eye, and almost to the touch, even though it is not to be touched. This is not unusual. It is widely understood that artworks discourage physical contact. And yet we routinely perceive texture with considerable sensitivity. We see roughness, smoothness, density, grain. We do not touch, but we register something of what touch embodies. We anticipate the feel of things—the coolness of stone, the warmth of paper, the rigid smoothness of glass—often without noticing that we are doing so. But how much of this sensitivity depends on prior contact, and how far might it diminish as that contact becomes less frequent, less practiced? This question becomes harder to ignore when set against the conditions under which images are now most often encountered.
On a screen, an image appears differently. It can be enlarged, reduced, or replaced almost instantly. It presents itself as light on a toughened uniform surface. It may depict texture—a rough wall, a woven fabric, the grain of wood—but the surface itself does not alter. The finger moves across the image, but meets only glass. One works not with the intimacies of objects but with smooth, implacable appearances that offer neither warmth nor resistance.
This has advantages. It allows for speed, for ease of circulation, for a reduction in material cost and physical burden. Work can be produced, shared and revised with a degree of flexibility that would previously have been difficult to achieve. These are valuable gains, but they are accompanied by other shifts. When the material surface is no longer encountered directly, the relation between seeing and touching loosens. Texture remains visible, but its presence changes. It ceases to be something that can be confirmed, resisted, or explored through contact, becoming suggested, implied, rendered as an effect. The image shows texture without yielding it.
Images have always differed from the things they depict. But the range of their material mediation has narrowed. Where once images arrived through varied surfaces, processes and resistances, they now increasingly appear through a single, ubiquitous interface. This difference doesn’t merely affect the appearance of images. It has implications for how attention develops. Sensitivity to surface, to subtle variations in weight or handling, doesn’t emerge all at once. It develops through repeated engagement—through looking, touching, comparing, returning, noticing again. It depends on having encountered materials under shifting conditions, on having registered small differences and recognising them as differences. Where that contact becomes less frequent, it is not unreasonable to expect that certain sensitivities begin to fade, while others take their place.
Current conditions make this more likely. Many students have limited resources for experimentation. Materials are costly. Space is constrained. There are pressures—financial, environmental, logistical—that favour methods which minimise waste, storage, and physical effort. Screens offer a practical response to these constraints because work can be made without accumulating objects, without transporting them, without committing to particular materials too early or even at all. Although this is an adaptation, it does mean that certain forms of engagement become easier to defer, avoid or miss. Decisions about surface, weight, temperature, and handling are postponed or displaced. Texture becomes something that can be represented rather than something that must be worked through and with.
Where texture once formed part of a material exchange—look, approach, adjust, notice—it now appears more often as a visual property that does not extend beyond the image itself. It is available to the eye, but less often to the body. For many students, this difference is not experienced as a loss but as a condition of practice. Opportunities for sustained material engagement are less frequent, and with them the small, iterative adjustments through which a sense of material subtlety is developed.
I am not suggesting that our tactile capacities are disappearing. The body remains acutely sensitive to texture—especially in the mouth, where a dense spectrum of sensations is continuously registered: slickness and drag, astringency and grain, melt and adhesion, crisp fracture and oily diffusion. My concern is more specific. It relates to a diminishing contact with the materiality of photographic objects—those sheets, leaves and scraps handled, stored, and re-encountered in studios, boxes, sleeves, folders and drawers. It seems difficult to dispute that screens have significantly altered this contact, tending not to cultivate the same degree of fine discrimination, sensitivity, or pleasure in objecthood. One might argue that absence intensifies awareness, and there may be some truth in this. Yet in relation to the development of material understanding, the erosion of direct, practical engagement appears to offer limited benefit.
There is, perhaps, a further consequence. Qualities that might once have been readily noticed—subtle variations of surface, the measured handling of material, the restraint required to let such differences register—can be easily overlooked. In their place, other tendencies come to the fore: more immediate effects, heavier contrasts, more assertive gestures. This is not simply a matter of individual competence or inexperience, but of the conditions that shape what can be learned in the first place. It reflects a shift in what is encountered often enough to be learned, and therefore, what is available to be noticed at all.
The student’s photographs and lino prints quietly resist this tendency. They do not alter the prohibition on touch, but they allow the surface to remain visibly active. The paper absorbs the light differently and asks that we look more intently, in a way that takes time and allows such subtleties to register. That asking is gentle and unobtrusive. It depends on a form of attention that is learned, and that, in part, relies on practiced material engagement.
The physical world is not simply a backdrop to experience, but the setting within which our perceptual and bodily capacities have developed. To encounter it less directly is not merely to change how we make images, but to alter, however subtly, the conditions under which we learn to sense and interpret them. What is changing, then, is not only our relation to images, but something more general. We still encounter, but under different conditions. And those conditions shape, in ways not always immediately evident, what it is possible for us to notice and to feel.
