Paul Indigo asks: Has the Internet Affected Our Appreciation of Photographs?
The obvious answer is yes, but his short article is worth reading nonetheless.
High resolution prints entice the viewer to look at the detail and explore an image. Large photographs hung on a gallery wall invite the viewer to spend even more time discovering every aspect of the image. Nothing beats a beautifully produced original print. Despite the proliferation of online images I still think the ultimate measure of a photograph is how it looks in print.
On screen with typical dimensions ranging from 500 pixels on the longest side to 800 pixels, and screen resolution at 72 dpi it is impossible to convey all the subtle details that a full resolution image holds. The images that work at small sizes are bold, dramatic and full of immediate visual impact. Subtle images are therefore not popular on sites which invite fellow users to comment such as Flickr.
A few comments…
The presentation of photographs on the web is something of a two-edged sword. Photographers, those interested in photographs, and others certainly have the opportunity to see much more photographic work than in the past. It would not be unusual for active Flickr viewers and/or users of other online photo sites to view hundreds of new photographs every day. Exposure to a wide variety of new photographic work certainly has value – among other things it has the potential to expand the photographic vocabulary of photographers and others more quickly than in the past. (An analogy to the changes in how we listen brought about by recorded music is apt.)
Certain types of photographs work well in the small and low detail presentation typically experienced on the web: photographs featuring large main elements, striking contrasts of color and light/dark, bold form, subjects with immediate appeal, strong manipulations of various elements, and low levels of significant small detail. There is nothing wrong with this – in a sense it is similar to the difference between creating a photograph that is intended to be viewed as a small print versus one intended to be viewed as a large print.
However, the web is very poor at – I’d actually say incapable of – properly presenting those wonderful photographs that rely on subtlety and detail. Here the print is still the best thing. The print photographer may work very carefully to get the print to convey exactly what he/she has in mind – and this print is often the direct expression of the photographer’s vision. However, the web is simply incapable to accurately reproducing the photograph precisely as the photographer envisioned it. There are so many variables – the monitor on which it is viewed, the browser used, the adjustment of the viewer’s computer, the compression algorithms used by the site storing the image, the lighting conditions at the viewer’s computer, and more – that viewers are more likely to NOT see the photograph as the photographer saw it.
In addition, we are not encouraged to spend time with the photograph when we view it on a web site. From my own experience viewing prints and online photographs it seems obvious that we virtually never give a photograph on the screen (unless it is one of our own that we are working on) the same attention that we give to a fine print. For virtually all of us, the experience of viewing on the screen is not one conducive to slow, careful, and deep appreciation – it is, for better or for worse, conducive to looking at a lot of stuff very quickly.
But even if we were willing to view on-screen photographs more slowly and carefully, taking the time to look more deeply and understand the subtleties than might be found there… the screen itself simply is not capable of displaying photographs with the level of detail and size necessary to comprehend what the photographer/printer had in mind. (Yes, there are exceptions – it is certainly possible to view an image that was intended to be viewed on the screen with little loss… as long as the monitor is calibrated correctly, and so forth – but that is an exception.) A small browser display of a photograph cannot possibly incorporate all of the detail found in the original. If it is viewed small enough to fit on the screen, huge amounts of detail must be thrown out in order to get it down to screen size. In order to see all of the original detail on typical monitors it must be viewed at a size much larger than that at which the photographer would print it… and the whole image cannot be seen at one time.
How much of a problem is this? With the “types of [photographs that] work well in the small and low detail presentation typically experienced on the web,” this isn’t an issue at all. But there is a lot of photographic work in which these subtle details are critical to appreciating the image. Here the print still rules.
(I’m thinking about all of this on a morning when I’m working on, you guessed it, a good size print that includes a ton of detail that is important and which will be invisible in the version I’ll post online soon. :-)