Photographer Hellen Van Meene has an incredible quote about photography: Photos don’t get better because they’re bigger. If you’re not familiar with who she is, Hellen Van Meene is a conceptual portrait photographer whose work has been highly celebrated for being starkly unique from anything else out there. We encourage you to do a deep dive of her work. This quote is attributed to her in the book Photographers on Photography. And in essence, just because a photograph might be larger than us doesn’t mean it’s all that great.
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Think about how many terrible photographs there are on billboards or in ads. Sometimes, I truly wish that the curators and art directors would love themselves enough to learn how to understand art from their feelings instead of from algorithms. An AI can read or understand what would work on social media from a metric point of view. But many of us didn’t do well in math while studying it in school. Numbers suck the romance out of creativity the way a weed sucks the joy from a garden’s diversity. In truth, good art isn’t about numbers — it’s an art of communication that’s vaguely comprehended and willingly backed by reasoning.
A photograph that looks good on a small screen, such as your phone, will surely look good when viewed on a larger screen. But after a while, if you just remove the screens, you have to look at a print. Larger prints surely do make us feel a completely different way than smaller images do because we have to interact with them differently. However, just because we interact with the image differently doesn’t mean it’s a great photograph.
A simple photograph of a tomato will still be a photograph of a tomato, no matter how large the size of it is. But an iconic image from Elliot Erwitt will have a great impact no matter how big the size of it is. These days, however, I argue that we need to engage more than one of the five senses. Holding a print makes someone become more engaged with it than simply looking at it on a wall — unless they know how to move around the space to view it from a different angle.
Hellen’s words are important. Several content creators on Instagram present their followers with a selection of images and then ask them to choose which one is the best. This, in turn, only feeds the attention economy — and more importantly, it’s only feeding a segment of people. Perhaps their followers aren’t all that educated on photography or even know what the photographer’s intent is for the image. Therefore, the photographer is communicating something, but that message isn’t being fully comprehended by the audience, which doesn’t care to fully read or understand what the photographer is communicating. While this seems like a way to authentically understand whether or not an image will do well, it fails. Instead, it’s more like asking people who’ve had their taste buds affected by COVID to rate a vanilla cream donut.
Do these people know how to understand photographs and look at them? Do they know how it’s going to be used? Do they understand what sort of context the images need?
No, they don’t. Instead, it’s often better to just educate yourself on the ins and outs of making a better photograph to understand how it can be made more effective.
