urban ku # 186 ~ I dislike mural photography
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 09:31AM 
Best Western ~ Lancaster, PA • click to embiggenWay back when - seems like half a century ago - one of my first blog entries was about quiet photography in which a writer, Gary Badger, mentioned "the muralist syndrome" - the relatively recent preoccupation in the Art world, photography division, with BIG prints. That is, really BIG prints, which until quite recently were often referred to as "murals". I have never been a fan of "murals" but, over the past year or so, I have become increasingly appreciative of really BIG prints, that is, prints larger than "standard" bigness of 20-30 inches or so.
That said, I am still very suspicious / unappreciative of BIG just for the sake of bigness. Some pictures take on an added dimension when printed BIG. These pictures manage to avoid turning into "murals" - think corporate lobby "wallpaper" pictures - when presented as BIG prints but for a while now I have been struggling with trying to understand why this is so.
One thing I have noticed about good BIG pictures is that they also "work" when presented as small pictures. These pictures do not need to be BIG to "work". As I mentioned, they just seem to gain an added dimension when viewed BIG. Maybe the reason for this is simply that a good picture can "work" at any size but, when it is presented BIG, it just seems to demand more attention. After all, we humans seem to be genetically imprinted with a fascination with BIG - BIG cars, BIG houses, BIG cathedrals, BIG guns, BIG dicks/tits, BIG production numbers .... you know what I mean ...nothing exceeds like excess.
That said, what is surprising to me is that "quiet" pictures - pictures of the ordinary - can remain "quiet" and intimate even when printed BIG or at least it seems so to me.
Have any of you made a really BIG print of your work? If so, have you noticed a new "dimension" to the picture? Can a BIG print be "quiet" and intimate?
Reader Comments (2)
30 x 40 is as big as I've dared to invest in so far - not exactly what I'd call REALLY BIG. (Of this photo.) But it's a very nice print size. In any normally sized room, you can see pretty much all the detail from across the room. The problems with going larger - which I'd love to do - aside from the costs are how do you mount/frame/transport such beasts; and where can you display them? Few of us can justify creating prints that are so large they won't fit on any wall in our house. So what's the point? It's not going to get onto the wall of a gallery that's big enough to display it.
I've not made anything BIG yet, but I have a few panoramas that I am trying to sell to a few corporate clients. I saw my first BIG prints at MOMA in NY in 2001 - a large Gursky exhibition. No doubt they were breathtaking prints. As for quietness, I think it is subject dependant, not size dependant. In general I have a problem with portraits of people when the print is too big (larger than life), but for landscapes it often work, and you rarely see prints larger than the actual landscape anyway.