I’ve always liked small photographs. Photography started that way with the Daguerreotype, and they had a privacy and an intimacy that has perhaps never been surpassed, requiring anyone who wished to enjoy them to hold them in their hand, open their case and angle them to the light to reveal their delicately detailed secret.
Even when I first experienced actual photographs well over a hundred years later, they were still small objects, perhaps around 3½” by 2½” kept carefully pasted into albums and largely brought out on special family occasions to pass around.
Much later I began to buy photographic books (first I wrote ‘collect’ but I’ve never really collected books, although I now have several thousand; for me it isn’t a collection but a working tool) and although some books are large and have quite big images, I can’t think of one single example of a truly great photographic book with photographs larger than around 8 x 10″.
In the middle of the 1970s I joined a local photographic club, and then went on another much larger club a few miles away. There I found that serious photographs were expected to be 20×16″ or at least 16×12″. I did make a few prints that size, but then began to rather shock some people by following the advice of Ansel Adam’s ‘The Print’ which had become my darkroom bible and presenting my prints in large neutral white over-mats. 20×16 was around the right size for a 12×8″ which became my standard ‘large’ print size, while smaller images fitted on 16×12. By the time I left the club (more or less by mutual consent) a few years later there were quite a few others following my example.
Fisher’s Removals, Spring Bank, Hull – from my 1983 show
My first – and really my only – big show in 1983 had around 140 images – I’m not sure now of the exact number, though it amuses me to think of it as 144 – a gross! Most were black and white images and were 160x106mm (approx 6.3×4.2″) a size I chose as the ideal for photographs from 35mm. They were shown mounted as pairs behind carefully cut white over-mats, rather like double page spreads in a book (with some pairs combined into a group of four one above the other.)
They were highly detailed prints and I think marked the zenith of my work as a photographic printer – working on such a small scale was tricky compared to making larger prints and they were all produced on Agfa materials which were shortly after replaced by inferior but less toxic materials.
Since then I’ve had a more relaxed attitude to print size, particularly with the advent of digital printing, which has enabled me to get more out of some of those old negatives – and now to even approach the quality of those old prints and even sometimes better it. For last month’s ‘East of the City’ show the prints I made, again from 35mm, were nominally 360x240mm (ca 14.2×9.4″) and work well, though I think I would prefer them at a slightly smaller size the quality holds up pretty well.
Years ago when I used to take my work to a particular client he would look at my 10×8’s (image size around 9×6″) from 35mm and buy them, but tell me that what he really liked about images taken on large format cameras was that you could take a loupe to the print and see more detail. For some kinds of documentary work that may be important, but for other photography it may be totally irrelevant.
And while I may like small prints you can hold in your hand, they are not necessarily suitable for all occasions. If you are going to hang photographs on walls they probably usually work better at a larger size than the same pictures in books.
Two things got me thinking about size of prints today. The second was writing about Gursky’s 80×140″ images of hugely expensive banality (and being mounted on glass it must also be pretty heavy.) But more pressing was the delivery here yesterday of the unsold prints from my ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ show. I’m still hopeful that a few of them will be sold, but at the moment I have them to look after, and the large carton containing them is taking up too much space in my hall. Usually I keep prints in my loft, but the hatch to enter that isn’t large enough for the carton or even the largest print to go through.
A 40×30″ print from ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’
I have one of the two 30×40″ prints that were made for the show and I live in a small house. My wife suggested hanging it on the wall of one of our downstairs rooms, but although it would fit it really is too large and out of scale with the other images already there. There are a couple of the smaller images that will fit nicely where one of my old triptychs fell down last year and I’ve not got around to re-framing it.
Fortunately I’ve managed to find what I think is an ideal space for the large garden image above, facing the landing at the top of the stairs, where it will fit nicely in the currently empty space above some smaller frames. The dark grey surround will I think look good on the rich brown hessian wall-covering and the image will almost be like a window in the wall.
But if someone were to give me the Gursky for Christmas that would have to go in the back yard. I think I’d leave it face to the wall.