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Size, or, painting envy
Valerie,
The small scale of most photographs compared to paintings and some other
media may be a disadvantage for juried shows and the like, but I'd say
it's a mistake to let one's prints be forced too large just to keep up
with paintings, since the task is impossible anyway. You can *always*
paint larger. And then there's sculpture. Just decide how big the
pictures want to be and do them that way. If what I wanted to say had to
be six feet across, I'd decide it had to be said in a medium other than
photography (or a very different photographic print medium from the ones
I use). 12x20 inches or so of densely packed pictorial content seems
quite adequate for my purposes, and often much smaller prints are even better.
One of my 12x20 palladium prints (contact, not enlarged negative) was
just juried into an open category show at a museum. It was dwarfed by
some of the 38 final pieces in the show, but was by no means the
smallest either, with several paintings and etchings quite a lot
smaller. More to the point, I thought the quality of the accepted
entries varied *wildly*. To assume a good piece of work was overlooked
simply because of small scale may sometimes be right, but other times it
may have been overlooked because of totally different idiosyncrasies of
the jury, the same ones that lead them to accept dreadful works of
various sizes.
---Carl
--
Web site with online galleries and workshop information at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~cweese/