Selling what my grandmother made

My grandmother made block-printed cotton throws for fifty years and sold them at two markets. When I listed them, I photographed them the way I had seen other stores do it — styled, folded, warm light, no detail.

They did not sell. What changed things was a single photograph of the reverse of the cloth, where the print bleeds slightly and the hand of the maker is obvious, with a caption explaining that every piece varies because it is stamped rather than machine-printed.

Orders started arriving from people who had been looking for exactly that and could not tell, from styled photographs, which listings were real hand-work.

We now photograph the imperfection first. It turns out the thing I was hiding was the thing people wanted to buy.