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I have a customer who is interested in four 24X24 inch prints to fit between a series of bookcases. She selected four images but one of them is very definitely rectangular - what to do?
Arguably the concept of asking Monet to trim off a few inches from one end of his paintings would be ludicrous - having Ansel shorten Moonrise absurd. I didn't immeditately tell the customer to drop dead though, I looked at the image and thought it might work quite well as a square image, and in fact might even be stronger than the rectangular original - is this a cop out?
Probably, but see for yourself what you think both about the ethics of agreeing to crop and the particular image pair here.
Is it in fact unreasonable when buying a photograph which can so easily be adjusted to ask for such a change - after all, they could easily have done the trim job themselves after purchase - at least this way I have some control over how it is cropped, and I do have the veto over saying, you know what - I don't want my name associated with what I think is a weaker image.
In this case I had a suspicion it might work out well and in hindsight believe it did.
This raises questions about the value and use of a photograph - is it inherently wrong to think of photographs as decoration - if we do, we eliminate 90% of our market for our photogrpahs. Should we in fact treat the images as holy relics, to be handled with white gloves and kept in a humidity and temperature controlled vault and only to be shown to a select few. What does this have to do with The Mona Lisa with Donald Ducks head?
1 comment:
Fascinating question, with no definitive answer of course. I think your comment about *you* the artist having the ultimate (arguably ONLY meaningful) control of the form "...you know what - I don't want my name associated with what I think is a weaker image.." is the key: regardless of the details of the whole artistic (and typically, for me, VERY long;-) process of getting a visualized image from film/CCD to print, the artist defines what "output" (and in what form that output) is communicated to others.
In short, if, as in this case, *you* are comfortable with the crop, you have effectively decided that the crop represents an artistic product you are willing to present to others. In this sense, it is no better or worse than, say, using a stray comment made by a passer-by (who is perhaps even uninterested in your photography per se) as a stepping-stone to shift your stance, or gaze, and thereby create a "different image" from the one you would have captured without the unsolicited comment.
Hope that makes some sense. But it is an intriguing question you raise. I have frequently *refused* to sell prints of certain subjects (that I printed in B&W) that a customer wanted in color. And that was/is emphatically an artistic boundary I choose not to cross.
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