In today’s preposterous world of almost infinite choice you would be forgiven for thinking that my views on print size as somewhat draconian.
In days gone by, if you were to purchase a picture to hang on your wall you would have, before the advent of photography, bought it from an artist. He may have painted your portrait or given you his interpretation of a landscape scene or painted your dog, but there is something he was very unlikely to have done. He wouldn’t have had a meeting with you about the appropriate size of the canvas he was about to use. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to offer a choice. And it wouldn’t have struck the customer to have asked. It just wouldn’t. And it wouldn’t have been for any particularly intellectual reason either.
It is only today that the intellectual reason has reared it head. And this is only due to the choices available by modern production methods. The artists in the old days knew a thing or two, but it wouldn’t necessarily have occurred to them that they knew anything at all. They just subliminally knew what was right, and their customers, not knowing which end of the paintbrush had the bristles, just went along for the ride.
Now you can have an image big enough to cover a wall or small enough to go into your wallet. The same image. And it’s so wrong. Obviously, you can still do it, but it’s quite bonkers.
There are many schools of thought on the subject. Such as, a photograph should be no bigger than can be held in the hand and viewed at arms length. Or, it should be small enough to be carried anywhere. Or, it should be as big as can be viewed on a given wall. These are all nonsense. Just like most ideas currently distributed and then re-distributed by those addicted to anything that looks plausible on the internet.
My take on the matter is that the optimum size of an image is entirely dependent upon the subject. That is not to say that you can’t have a small version of an image of a big subject like “The Grand Canyon.” That’s fine, but it just won’t be the optimum size. The right size. The size that works the best. A big work like Salvador Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” (1951) just wouldn’t work as a ten inch print, any more than his masterful and diminutive painting “Basket of Bread” (1926) would, if it were poster sized.
Here’s a music equivalent. Imagine one day you are listening to a solo harp on your HiFi system at home, and the next day you are listening to a grand orchestral work. You wouldn’t listen to them at the same volume level. Well, you might, but you’d be silly because trying to recreate the original ‘feel’ of the performances optimises the experience. If you played the harp music at the same volume level as the orchestral work it would sound hugely overblown. Well, it’s the same for pictures. In my case, photographic artwork.
By the way, you really shouldn’t look at quality photographic artwork on a computer monitor either. The choice of paper and inks are all part of the finished product. Quite apart from the fact that everybody’s monitor is different (probably un-profiled), and what was I just saying about the right size?