Big Picture Frame – Stanley

So the sculpture is not a representation of anything. It is a device: a frame that turns the view into a photograph before you have taken one, positioned so the landform sits inside it. That makes it one of the few Big Things whose subject is somewhere else, and one of fewer still that admits outright what nearly all of them are really for – being stood in front of, with a phone.

It is an idea that has spread widely in recent years, and it is easy to be sniffy about it. But at Stanley it earns its place, because the framing device is doing something the landscape cannot do for itself: giving a scale reference and a fixed composition to a shape so large and so close that most visitors photograph it badly.

Burnie City Council currently promotes the frame as a Stanley photo stop, and the official Stanley and Tarkine visitor map identifies it as an attraction.

It is free and outdoors. The maker, date and dimensions are not established in the record.