Print size, how does it matter?

[Toyon]

I went to see an exhibition of Martin Schoeller. His giants prints are 4 and 5 feet square approximately and are carefully composed closeups of heads, mostly celebrities and a few noble-looking non-celebrities. They looked huge in the relatively modest room they were displayed, and you could see, without really meaning to, the spots on say, Meryl Streep's lower eyelid. It is a curator's dream show, featuring both cutting-edge formats and famous people. After a decade long run of increasingly giant photographic art prints, this may have been the ultimate. These heads were enormous, drive-in movie big, close-ups previously available only to reconstructive surgeons. They were really carefully crafted and posed.

I went home and looked at a couple of my own black and white prints (a landscape). I put prints on my wall to let them "age" so that I can decide whether I like them. One is 11x14 and the other 16x20. I was struck by how different the smaller one looked from the larger. The smaller one reminds me a bit of Asian brush art, the tiny details of light on a branch that on the print is only about 1/8 of an inch in diameter. On the large print, the same detail is less important, and the moodiness of the scene (a swamp) predominates. The details so sharp in the little print, become subordinated to the bigger themes of dark sky, reflective water and the screen of brush. It is amazing to me that such a relatively small difference in print size has such a big effect.

Last year I went to an exhibition of Laura McPhee's giant prints of large format landscapes of Alaska. Amazing locational photography of scenes from Alaska and the West in vivid cold-toned color. I was really drawn in by the images, but left wondering whether the prints were compelling due to their content and composition, or due to their size. I asked several other photographers I knew had seen the show, and they admitted to wondering the same thing.

I couple of years previously I was on my annual trip to see works in the avant garde Chelsea gallery district of New York. After seeing many huge color prints, with cottonball grain, of warehouses and parking lots, and beautifully printed mega-prints of empty museum spaces and dollar-store interiors I walked into a town house that housed two small galleries. They had a showing of vintage Kertesz prints of New York, none larger than maybe 8x12 and some much smaller. They really got to me. There is something about taking in a print, quite close, yet small enough that the whole scene is within your visual "grasp". It gives you both the largeness of the composition - Kertesz eye - and its context and extraordinary details, a certain shadow falling across the snow, or the hunch of the shoulders of a passerby's back. I can see them now. With giant prints, I have the feeling I had as a little kid looking at the Gemini space capsule returned from earth orbit, awe. With the smaller prints, it was like my whole mind, my life experience could be focused through a lens - Kertesz' lens. I am convinced that his prints would not affect me the same way if they were blown up to giant size. Similarly, I think the prints of Schoeller or McPhee would not have a lot of impact in 8x10 or smaller. The Egyptians and the Easter Islanders understood the power of giant images, while the early Islamic artists, the Chinese and Japanese excelled at and understood the power of exquisitely rendered smaller work. Kertesz was born in a region that historically mixed European and Asian cultures.

Don't misunderstand me, I like giant prints, they really have a powerful effect. What distresses me is that the sense that the power of smaller images get crowded out due to the exigencies of warehouse-sized gallery walls, heroic museum spaces and art-buyers egos. I'd like to see room for both. Big prints have never been so accessible to photographers and are pushed by manufacturers hyping megapixels and large format printers in a quest to stay profitable in the relentlessly commoditizing business of digital imaging products. So we know why the commercial and gallery world favors large prints.

But what do you folks see and think about print size and how it affects your experience of photography?

[Walter Calahan]

It's not the size, it's the (e)motion that matters.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Ha ha ha ha

[John Voss]

Whenever I've attended an AIPAD show, and had a chance to actually pick up a print and hold it at less than arm's length, I've been able to all but lose myself in it. To see one on a wall and go up close has offered a similar experience. But I've also had the opportunity to see enormous prints and enjoy them also. A Salgado exhibition in NYC displayed some very large prints with, as you put it, cotton ball grain which were wonderful. In Chelsea, an array of huge color prints were also interesting. Of the two kinds of experiences, though, I think I prefer ones with the smaller, more intimate images. I'm a rather private person in a public venue, and would rather enjoy the work I like more one to one so to speak....i.e. not looking at a wall with several other folks standing beside me (which is of course the norm at museums for the most part.), but it's hard to generalize. I like small, accessible towns a great deal also, but love big way-out-of-human scale cities too. I'm glad this isn't a poll....I'd never be able to vote absolutely one way or the other.

[Brian Ellis]

" . . . but left wondering whether the prints were compelling due to their content and composition, or due to their size."

I remember seeing an exhibit of Clyde Butcher photographs a few years ago,about 4x5 feet. At first I thought they were great, then when I got used to the size and started looking at them as photographs rather than huge objects I thought they were less great. And when I got close (not nose on print, just a couple feet away) and saw the blown out highlights and blocked shadows I didn't think they were particularly good at all. Once I saw that sort of thing from close I continued to see it even when standing farther back. I wondered whether the museum that was exhibiting them would have bothered if they had been smaller and suspected that it was only the size that caused them to be exhibited. This isn't a knock on Clyde Butcher, he's done some wonderful work, just a criticism of this particular exhibit.

I think the huge print fad is just that, a fad. It will go away once the novelty wears off, at which point artists will hopefully revert to sizing based on the image content and not size for the sake of size. Obviously different photographs call for different print sizes, not all are effective big, not all are effective small. Right now I think it's partly just "big for the sake of being big" in some (certainly not all) cases. I haven't seen the celebrity head show you mention, maybe the size is appropriate to the subject but somehow photographs of people's heads doesn't strike me as a subject that's best suited to 4' x 5' prints once you get over the novelty of seeing heads this big.

[Bruce Watson]

I've been playing with this idea of print sizes for years. Studying it, trying to figure it out. I've come to some conclusions on my own that may or may not be supported by the experiences of others.

What I've found for my work is that I have to let the image tell me what size it wants to be printed. In general (let's say that again: in general) I've found that my images want print size to have some proportional meaning. That is, photographs of small thing want to be printed small, and photographs of big things want to be printed big. To put it really bluntly, print size is just another tool to use to present the image.

What doesn't work at all for me is large prints of small things. Once you pass the "life size" barrier, it begins to fall apart for me. For example, flowers. I've tried numerous times to make big prints of small flowers but they just look all out of proportion. I loose the exquisite beauty I was trying to show. So most of my flower images won't let me print them bigger than about a 3x enlargement (from 5x4 negatives). And I don't do macro work (yet) so this puts most of them at life size or considerably less.

OTOH, I've made some rather large prints of rather large subjects. For example, I've got a print of a grove of Giant Sequoias that's 150 cm long (about a 12x enlargement from a 5x4 negative). The print works really well at that size. Better than smaller prints. There's a huge amount of detail on that 5x4 negative and printing this size lets it all come out.

The middle distance photographs are more difficult to size. Some want to be big, some want to be small. I find that each image will tell me what it wants if I'll only listen to it.

As to the fads and fashions in the art world, I find it's best to not spend too much time worrying about that which I can't control. All I can do is make my photographs and print them as best I can to try and communicate a little of what I was feeling when I made the photograph. If I can do that, I feel pretty good about it, regardless of the current fashion in print sizes.

[Steven Barall]

You can't generalize about size or anything else when it comes to personal things. Just take each photo for what it is. One thing isn't better than another thing.

If you're looking to join the art photographers club however and the marketplace is the important thing then big size can be very helpful for a couple of reasons. First of all, if the photographer and the photos really don't have much going for them in the first place, then some sort of trick like very very large size might be all there will be to hang your hat on. (Another good trick is to make the prints smaller but make many many of them and hang them all together.) And secondly as it turns out, big size is good because it sells really well. If it looks impressive then it must be impressive and like you said, those big huge galleries have to fill up all that space.

Of course big prints can also be really cool. Who doesn't want to see their photos on a billboard? I would love that but I don't plan for it as far as my own production goes. There are very serious people who use specific sizes as an integral part of their work.

Take pictures and have fun. Have a nice weekend.

[Mark Sawyer]

" I remember seeing an exhibit of Clyde Butcher photographs a few years ago,about 4x5 feet. At first I thought they were great, then when I got used to the size and started looking at them as photographs rather than huge objects I thought they were less great. And when I got close (not nose on print, just a couple feet away) and saw the blown out highlights and blocked shadows I didn't think they were particularly good at all...

I had rather the same feelings seeing recent very, very large prints by Richard Avedon and Jay Dusard. Of course, recalling how beautiful Dusard's 8x10 contact prints from the same negatives were did not help the larger prints...

In the end, print size is a matter of volume, not content. Rather like asking, "how loud should the music be?" I'd guess touring the galleries now would be like hopping a string of clubs where all the bands play really, really loud. Fun while your out, perhaps, but is it what you play at home? Is there still a place out there for the little bars where the bands play accoustic or jazz?

The gallery scene's "in-this-season" trend will last a while, then shift to something else. If you work according to such dictates, I think you've lost something. Perhaps a more important question would be "Current art-world trendiness: do you let it affect your work?"

And for the contact printers among us, enjoy the irony the "large format" means "small prints"...

[Jim Ewins]

:) While I feel that subject matter could determine print size, there is that concept that an ideal viewing distance is a multiple of of the focal length. Perhaps those mega prints need to be viewed from down th block.

[Alan Davenport]

Manufacturers don't hype megapixels and huge printers in order to make consumers buy them; they produce them because the market demands them.

Of course, size matters. To believe otherwise is to say that a 35mm slide is the equal of an 8x10 transparency. Each serves a purpose, but they are not the same.

[Toyon]

I learned a lot from these responses. I think a lot of us wonder about these esthetic issues.
But a couple of people misread the question. It doesn't ask whether "size matters", but "how does it matter." As far as hype, consumer demand is driving the industry, there is no question, but the push to sell more and more pixels, and to accelerate obsolescence, is industry driven and not to the benefit of any but a small portion of the market - the advanced amateur and professional. But the hype is a necessity for manufacturers who see margins shrinking quickly on products that were highly profitable just a few months ago - they have to make "new and better" or cede most of the market to cheaper Asian producers. The same dynamic has chiefly driven Intel's constant chip upgrades.

[Ed Richards]

Do not forget that acreage in prints is pushed by manufacturers because it sells a LOT more ink and paper.

How does it matter? I think that LF does not make sense, except as some sort of zen penitence, unless you make prints large enough to show a reasonable amount of the detail in the negative.

So 11x14 begins to show detail and 16x20 is great, and 20x24 (image size maybe 17x20) might be a good balance between intimate enough to see up close and detailed enough to show off the media. At that point you are seeing the little details that make LF so rich, and which really change the nature of the experience.

For example, I have some crowd shots at Mardi Gras. In small prints, there is nothing much going on. When the print gets large enough to start seeing expressions on the faces of the folks and all the interesting things they are doing, the viewing experience changes from a quick gestalt experience to one that rewards contemplation.

However, for me at least, there needs to be something interesting in the details, and when the print scale is vastly beyond the detail, it stops working for me. Giant prints of dime stores and the like are lost on me. Giant prints of landscapes with popcorn grain also do not interest me much.

[MIke Sherck]

I have to agree with Bruce that, in my experience with my prints, each negative seems to demand a particular print size. For me, a more complex image demands a larger print, while a simpler image works better as a smaller print. From my own personal perspective, for example (and this is just an example, chosing pictures which we are all likely to have seen and can recall,) Ansel Adams' majestic vistas of mountains and sky and weather would look ridiculous as 8x10 prints, while Weston's Pepper #30 would be grotesque as a monster 20x24 mural. The Adams image is full of details which enlargement brings to scrutiny, while Weston's, equally complex in its own but different way, lives perfectly happy in, like the pepper it is a representation of, the palm of one's hand. In that vein, I've seen massive enlargements of faces and heads and was left unimpressed. They didn't work for me.

Of course this is a simplification and certainly imperfect at that: my command of English is lacking in many ways and my thoughts not always clear. It seems to me to be a simple observation and since I'm a simple person, it works for me. Your mileage may vary. Also, I've never been prone to wearing black and being morose so obviously, I'd make a poor artist. :)

Mike

[Ray Bidegain]

And for the contact printers among us, enjoy the irony the "large format" means "small prints"...

Mark:

Good one.

Ray Bidegain

[David_Senesac]

I have to strongly echo Bruce's comments about subject size dictating appropriate print sizes especially versus the actual human visual experience. Its nice to see someone else having independently come to some of the same conclusions I did years ago. And like him, my sense of that was apparently influenced in part by looking at closeup images of flowers printed larger that we normally experience them. Of course that is a vague correlation that might not apply to specific cases. I recall one exhibit where Hassleblad images of intensely saturated flowers had been blow up to small billboard sizes. Interesting at times from 20 feet away, but I might have been just as satisfied with the same images printed well at 11x14 when viewed from arms length. Accordingly most of my own wildflower and other closeups are made with my 7mp Coolpix because for that amount of resolution I can make smaller prints that are approximately at life size.

For me at least, a sharp large print output at 300ppi or such looks best when viewed close from less than a few feet. A feeling of being in the scene is something we large format photographers can offer our audience that simply cannot be provided by anything less than sharp medium format. Accordingly as a landscape photographer, the kind of scenery I tend to capture includes lots of fine detail and geometry.

Now some of the newer exhibits with highly detailed prints do look impressive to me if and only if I can get close to the prints without the usual billboard effect of loss of fine detail. However really large prints more than 4 feet across become difficult to get near to because one needs to move back more and more for one's eye's to encompass the full scene. And as prints get larger there also are increasing problems with the print lighting else glare and reflections make viewing the whole flawed. ...David