Why We Built Framewick

By Keenan Mayo

There is a photograph on my wall of a battered orange sign.

It reads, in hand-lettered capitals, "TO INFORMATION BUREAU", with an arrow pointing off to one side. The paint has blistered, the board is rust-bitten, and behind it the African sky is a flat cloudless blue. It was taken by a dear friend and mentor, a man who spent his career going to places most of us spend our lives avoiding. He is gone now. The photograph is not, and I walk past it every morning, and most mornings it makes me smile.

For most of my life I have loved photographs. As a junior magazine editor in my formative years, I used to steal prints from the photo department and get them framed, quietly, on the company account using my boss's name. I once spent months tracking down an old photograph by the American Dust Bowl chronicler Russell Lee, a search that took me all the way to his estate at the University of Texas. I hang them, I lean them against walls, and I find myself moving them from room to room for no particular reason.

I truly believe that we are living in an era of peak photography. The most capable camera most of us has ever owned is sitting in a pocket right now, doing extraordinary things. A modern phone takes as many as nine frames for a single press of the shutter and stitches the best of each into one image, balancing a bright sky against a shadowed face in a way that once took a darkroom and a great deal of patience. Ninety-four percent of the world's photographs are now taken this way. We capture more than five billion of them a day, and the average camera roll holds somewhere north of two thousand. The tool is no longer the limitation, and it has not been for years.

Which is why I believe, with very little doubt, that there are at least five photographs hidden in your camera roll right now that you would genuinely treasure on your wall. Not the screenshots or the receipts or the seventeen near-identical shots of the same sunset, but five real ones. The light caught a certain way. A face you love, before it knew it was being watched. You have already done the hard part, which was being there and pressing the shutter. The pictures exist. They are simply waiting somewhere you will probably never scroll back to.

The trouble was never that people did not want their pictures on the wall. It was that getting there had become absurd. The trip to the framer, the wait, the conversation about mouldings you did not know you needed to have, the moment at the till when you see the price and wonder whether you are funding someone's high street rent. I spent years caring about how things are made and how they are presented, and framing struck me as a craft that had quietly forgotten the person it was meant to serve.

So we have spent sixteen months building the alternative: Framewick.

You upload an image from your camera roll. You choose a frame and a mount. We handcraft the piece in England and send it to your door within seven to ten days, ready to hang, usually at less than half what a high street framer would charge. No appointment, no measuring, no disappointment at the till. The aim was to remove every reason you have ever had not to do this, and to leave only the pleasure of choosing. 

Because that is the thing I keep coming back to. A picture kept on a screen is one you have quietly agreed to forget. Framed and hung where you live, it goes on working on you. It holds a place, a morning, a joke only you understand, a person who is no longer here.

My orange sign points its arrow at a blank stretch of wall where there is nothing to find, and I think of the man who took it, and for a moment it is as if he is still here.

We are open now, with an opening collection we have kept deliberately small. In the coming months it will grow considerably, and before long you will be able to send us the physical things too, the print in a drawer, the letter, the object that has never had a frame worthy of it.

Keenan Mayo

Managing Director