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?