A publication about the part nobody photographs

The shutter is the shortest part of making a photograph. Everything that decides what the work becomes happens afterwards, mostly by hand, and mostly out of sight.

GRID Photofestival is written around seven stages: the edit, the sequence, scale, the print, the book, the archive, and the terms the other six assume you already know. Twenty-four entries in all. Each one takes a single decision — which frames go, how large a print wants to be, what the fold of a book takes from a spread — and sets out what the decision costs the work.

There is no programme here and nothing to attend. The site does not review current work, rank anybody, or recommend equipment. Where a photographer is named, they are named because the material requires it.

The photographs are of the work itself: light tables, walls of work prints, trays, dummies, sleeves and boxes. They are captioned to say the thing the picture cannot.

Entries carry no dates. The decisions they describe have not changed much and are unlikely to.