That’s absurd on several fronts. For one, the picture is already created. Unless there’s some dodging or burning to be done, or some playing around with the contrast, the picture is what it is. Otherwise you could claim that anytime someone reproduces a famous print (say Ansel Adams), that they are taking part in the creative process.
Secondly, artists have often considered the future placement of their work when deciding how to present it. In this case, location matters. For a very large enlargement, the viewer is going to have to stand at some distance in order to get the whole effect and so that any grain is not perceptible. And obviously you’re not going to hang a 50"x50" picture in the upstairs hallway.
That said, while I think blowing the picture up is going to be a bit much, in this case, the client knows what they want.
Since I won’t be hung for an opinion, here goes. Firstly terrific composition and would look great in lots of settings. It displays at about 8" on my monitor and looks great at that size. Personally I don’t think that bigger offers anything extra. I would only be interested in a 16 square foot print for one of two reasons - to more accurately foster the air/space of the original (obviously I’m thinking Adams) or to change the viewers perspective by presenting an image as it could never be seen really (some large ManRay? prints I saw). I fancy that in a huge size the shadowed area and the area surrounding the plant will become intrusive and soften the drama of the image.
Well, gee. The 4x4 print of it is entirely boring. It’s so small that one can barely sense the beauty in the details. It’s reduced to a postcard. " yeah, a cactus…"
Perhaps I’m prejudiced, or perhaps I’m way too in love with the impact of some of my shots ( entirely possible ). I have This landscape as well as This portrait as well as a dozen or so other prints in 4x5 format.
Clearly the landscape stuff suffers. The faces are still moving even though they are small. Maybe we’re wired this way? Or more accurately, programmed by 160 years of photographic image viewing, to think that a sweeping landscape needs to be 16 x 20, whereas a portrait can be any size and still touch the heart? ( I’m not implying that the portrait linked is especially touching. I’m just saying that faces touch the heart in a different way than landscapes do ).
Hmmmm. Almost all of the prints I have in the house of my work are 11x14. I might free up some wall space if I took a really hard look at some of them and thought about how they might “feel” on the walls if they were smaller. Then again, I might wind up with gigundous prints everywhere…
I believe that the rigorously scientific term that applies is “fucking huge”.
IIRC, the aloe was roughly 4 feet across. Maybe a shade more. Were I to demand artistic purity (ahem), I’d claim that a print HAD to be 4 feet square to do it justice. Of course, that logic makes the landscape prints exceedingly expensive to reproduce in kind…
No problem; I’m probably just a lot harder to deal with for most clients than you are. FWIW, I haven’t done any photography to speak of for several years. Nowadays my commissions are for knitting. I go to a client’s house, look through their wardrobe, get a sense of their taste, and design from there. I make it clear at the outset that they’re commissioning my taste and my design sense, more than they’re commissioning the labor. If they have something very specific in mind I send them elsewhere; I’m not interested in doing busywork on a design I didn’t create. Granted these conditions are not acceptable to some, but most of my clients are fine with it; makes the final product a surprise. Or something.
Right you are, but you can see where I might have been Confused a bit.
Thank you for the correction, though. Glad I titled it Sedona Cactus. ( If someone comes in here and tells me that agave is a fruit and not a cactus, I’ll weep. )
Non-professional but art-appreciator opinion-provider checking in.
I’m going to go against the grain of what seems to be the popular opinion here and say that the photo in the OP should not be any larger than 8"x10" (or, I suppose 10"x10" since it is square). I think interesting art (photos or otherwise) should draw you in, rather than cause one to step back. I prefer intimate to overpowering.
4’x4’? I personally think that’s nuts. That size of image only works for me if it’s abstract.
Not that anyone cares because it’s not part of the issue at hand, but to further provide information about my point of view I’d say the landscape photo linked to later in the thread could go larger than 8"x10", but the portrait in that same post should not.
Yes; some aloes look a lot like agaves. But if the leaf is arched rather than mostly straight, and convex with spines along the margins, it’s probably an aloe. Agaves also tend to be more densely leaved.
I haven’t read the whole thread, so I probably sound like a parrot. But I think it would be good as a small picture – you won’t lose a ton of detail, so why take up more space than necessary? I suppose it depends on how much wall space you have in the area in question, though.
The artwork in my home is a bunch of different sizes-- some paintings are 4"x4", some photos are 8"x10", some pastels are 12"x16" (or something like that), and I’ve got one painting original that’s about 3’x4’. And I’ve got more artwork that I don’t have up, mostly because I don’t have the room, or because it doesn’t work in the space I do have.
For that piece, if I was going to remove something I have and put it up, I’d go for an 8"x8", maybe a 12"x12", but certainly no larger. However, I don’t know where your client intends to hang it, so his MMV.
I say go small, for the ambiguity of the image when first glanced from afar… it might be momentarily mistaken for a sea urchin (seriously!)… and some of the pleasure of viewing the photo would be in resolving that mystery, contemplating the odd coincidences found in nature, the way that scale plays with our perception of reality, etc.
I also think it would look good when paired with a blown-up image of something very small, strongly patterned, and natural, such as the tracery of frost on a windowpane.
I think that a large size could work for this photograph because the image itself is relatively simple. Plus, big plant = big reproduction. However, in emotional terms, because of the sharp angles, a 3’ or 4’ square enlargement of this particular image might create a feeling of anger or aggression. In that sense I wouldn’t want a 4’ X 4’ version of this in, say, the bedroom or anywhere else I would want to feel relaxed. (I love cacti and succulents so this is just about the angles and shadows.)
