Smoking Wall Art

Smoking Wall Art

Smoke is the technical problem here, and it decides which images work. It is pale, thin and half transparent, so it only registers when there is something dark behind it — a black studio ground, a shadowed interior, a night street. Against a light wall or a bright sky, the curl of smoke that made the picture interesting all but disappears, and what remains is somebody holding something.

That is why most good work in this category is dark overall, and a dark image behaves differently on a wall. It reads as a hole rather than a panel, holding its own against a pale room instead of decorating it. It also needs light thrown at it; hung on a dim wall, a low-key photograph becomes a black rectangle and all that careful shadow detail is lost.

Tone varies more widely than the category name suggests: film-noir glamour, documentary street photography, painterly portraits, retro advertising pastiche, and the comic animal images that turn up in bars. They do not mix. Pick a register before you buy, and accept that a room reads any of them as a comment on the subject whether one was intended or not.

Rooms with lower light and later hours suit this best — a snug, a study, a games room, the wall behind a drinks trolley. It is not a kitchen subject and obviously not a children's one, and some guests will have views. That is no reason to avoid it, only a reason to hang it somewhere chosen rather than somewhere unavoidable.

Hang it lower than instinct suggests. These are nearly always pictures of a face, meant to be met at seated eye level from a chair a few feet away rather than glanced at over a mantelpiece. Drop the centre of the image to roughly the height of a standing person's chest and it stops feeling like signage.