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After my post of my own image in my last blog entry, I thought about this image. It too is quite simple. It also doesn't show a lot for the effort of blowing it up to a really large print.
I do think there are differences however.
In this case there is almost no texture to the various shapes and even in a 9 foot high print, they are simply going to be that - shapes. It's almost as if you either need a lot to offer or nothing distracting from the shape as subject.
As an image this has several things going for it. I count a total of 12 curved lines, from wheel to headlight to axle, shadow and object. This repetition pulls the image together. Had there only been three similar lines or shapes, it might well have been weaker.
You can see where I learned to move in and crop tightly - this image is so different from an image of the whole cycle would have been and is almost an abstract.
The curve in the upper left corner nicely meets the headlight at the edge of the print.
I do wonder at the worth of that little square in the upper right hand cornet - it would have been so easy to crop - but Strand may well have been contact printing and perhaps didn't believe in cropping (like a fair number of others). On the other hand he may well have felt that the square within the frame of white broke up the unrelieved dark area and been happy to keep it.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Paul Strand, I do heartily recommend it to you. Some of his portrait work is wonderful.
2 comments:
Have you ever seen an original copy of "Mondrian's Pipe and Glasses" by André Kertész? It is a very small contact print. Probably many of the reproductions you have seen in magazines or books are bigger than the origianl.
I try to have a sense about the size that a print should be, some of my favorite images are printed small, but some immediately say to me print large.
By small I mean 3.5x5 inches, large for mean is 16x20. Also the process that I use to print helps to dictate how large I feel a print needs to be. Often my tri-color bichromates are small or medium small, for gum over palladium I will print larger. During the past year and a half I've been working with stitched images, either from film or digital captures and for some of those I really enjoy printing long inkjet prints.
Of course the down side to all of this print sizes that I tend not to have a standard print size as some people do, which makes matting and framing more of a chore since frames and matts can't be recycled.
Don Bryant
Sadly, the art world embraces large prints, no matter what the subject matter. I was just an exhibit of landscapes shot with a D300 and all printed at least 24x36, with at least a third printed even larger. They were printed so large that I had to stand 8-10 feet back as to not be distracted by the pixelization. At that distance, the matte and paper selections were moot.
Nothing would have been lost if these had been printed on 19" or 22" paper (indeed, they may have been MORE powerful), but in the art world, as in sex, size matters.
The work received rave reviews and I heard a goodly number of other patrons mention how beautiful the prints were. I mean, they WERE nice, overall, but way too large.
That said, photographs have a way of self-regulating viewing distances. Highly detailed and intricate work will invited closer examination, whereas simpler and less detailed (pixelated?) work will ask the viewer to remain back a few steps.
That all said, if anyone has a Paul Strand photo they feel is too large for the given subject matter, I would be willing to take it off your hands for, say, $250...cash? Just a thought.
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