Bigger Isn't Always Better: The Failures of "Big Art"
February 27, 2025
Walk into almost any contemporary photography gallery today, and one thing becomes immediately clear: the photographs are enormous. The prints span entire walls, towering over viewers, dwarfing frames, and sometimes—drowning content. There's a growing belief in the art world that bigger means better. Bigger shows confidence. Bigger commands attention. Bigger sells. But I would argue that this trend is not only misguided—it is actively damaging the integrity of photographic art.
Photography fails constantly. And when it fails, large scale only magnifies the failure. A weak photograph, printed at six feet wide, doesn’t gain strength through sheer size—it simply exposes its own emptiness more dramatically. It’s like shouting a mediocre sentence through a megaphone. The volume increases, but not the value.
This obsession with scale reflects a crisis of confidence, not a surplus of talent. For some, large format has become a refuge for small ideas—concepts too thin to withstand close, quiet scrutiny, yet dressed up in grandeur to compensate for a lack of visual or emotional substance. It’s a sleight of hand: overwhelm the senses, and hope no one notices there's nothing underneath.
It wasn't always this way. Many of the most iconic photographs in history are small. Think of the intimate silver gelatin prints of Diane Arbus or the quiet 8x10 contact prints of Walker Evans. Their power comes not from size, but from clarity of vision and emotional honesty. These photographers trusted the image to speak without needing to shout.
Size in art can be meaningful—sometimes even necessary. But it has to be earned. It should emerge from the concept, not precede it. When Andreas Gursky prints at mural scale, it’s not to inflate a weak image, but to reflect the overwhelming systems and structures he’s critiquing. There’s a reason for the magnitude. But when scale becomes default—when “big” is the creative solution rather than the result of one—it points to a shallow understanding of the medium’s possibilities.
If the only solution to a lack of originality is to go bigger, we’re in deep trouble. We lose the quiet image. We lose the contemplative moment. We lose the trust in photography’s ability to whisper rather than scream.
As an artist with an MFA in photography, I believe we need to re-center the conversation around vision, not volume. Photography isn’t cinema. It doesn’t need to dominate a wall to move a viewer. In fact, sometimes the smallest photographs pull us in the closest—and that proximity, that intimacy, is where true power resides.