Resumen de Photography and scale: projection, exhibition, collection
As a reproducible media, photography can indefinitely duplicate the same image, but is can also modulate the scale of it by each new copy, changing its impact, display and potential audience. This flexible reproducibility has allowed photography to invest in a multiplicity of spatial, cultural and social realms and sustian its ubiquity. It has also conditioned its complex relatioship to art, in which enlargement has played a central role. This essay presents a broad survey outlining the shifting responses to large-format photographs over 150 years. It shows how, depending on the period, their status oscillated between on one hand being art and on the other industrial, disposable pictures made primarily for mass communication. These different approaches are respectively exemplified by the recurring attempts to give photographs the aura of the 'tableaux', and the rise of the photomural in the 1930s, torn between the models of billboard and monument.
