The Emotional Theory of Print Size

I’ve yet to come across anything more valuable than these words from Dr Les Walkling when it comes to choosing a print size and I’d like to share them with you here.

“The greatest gift of photography is returning this new object to the world as a new possibility. A new hope or a completion of a cycle. Returning the image to the world from which it came. ”

 – Dr. Les Walkling

The size of a picture undoubtedly affects our relationship with it, but how does this work?

 

The Heart

A picture that is the size of a hand, or the size of a heart, is the picture at its most intimate, private and introverted scale. Only one person at a time can fully engage with this picture, whether it hangs on a wall or lives on a page. For the most intimate gestures function best at this scale. It is not a broad stroke; but a caress, a mark, a moment or glimpse of things that have been or are about to become. Such small gestures carry the emotional weight of this world.

The Head

When a picture expands to the size of a head, an 8×10 inch print if you like, we seem in the first instance to respond more intellectually than emotionally. The distinctions we glean are more of the head than of the heart. I think it is no coincidence that modernist photography was in large part founded around the 8×10 inch contact print. After all, modernism was first and foremost an intellectual movement.

The Body

When a picture is around the width of our body, we start to respond more kinesthetically, that is, we begin to respond more physically in the first instance, rather than intellectually or emotionally. I know we are all different sizes, but this response remains very real, in the sense that so much of what we know about the world comes to us through our physical interaction with it.

 

The Embrace

Once the print is larger than our body but not our out-stretched arms, our embrace, it tends to speak on behalf of a community, or a family or collective. This is still personal in the sense that a family is our own, but it is a broader concern than just us, that is, broader than our emotional connection to it (the heart) or our thoughts about it (our head), or our under-standing of it (our body). 

The Panoptic

When the picture reaches beyond our outstretched arms (our physical embrace) it tends to speak on behalf of the social contract itself; our cultural, political, historical, ideological and sociological concerns. In other words the picture is now large enough to embrace ‘more than we can’. It is now the collaboration of hearts and minds, bodies, people, things and ideas. Images at this scale are therefore ‘all embracing’ and inclusive. Think of the grand history paintings in museums and galleries all over the world. Think of the scale of the museums themselves, or of the cinema, or sporting arenas, of parliaments, cities and towns. 

Because images are composed of images, both real and imagined, so it is in the recombination of hearts and minds, bodies, friends and families that the lives, ideas and the pictorial business of this world gets done. When an image the size of a heart is placed beside ‘a head’ and ‘a body’ within a unified and embracing composition, is when a picture becomes really interesting as a picture, irrespective of its subject matter. Just as a life carries itself and all that it represents and remembers with it, so a picture carries and projects its scale related meanings back into the world.

<Source: Dr Les Walkling>

 

Until next time,