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Have you ever opened your e-mail to find in your inbox several e-mails with the subject: "Does Size Matter?" I think you might have. I read somewhere that around 250 billion of such spam e-mails have been sent all over the world.
In the prestigious Journal of Photographic Arts, CAMERAWORK published in San Francisco, Vol # 30, this past winter, I came across an interesting article by Geoffrey Batchen, under the title "Does Size Matter?" making reference to the intimacy between the viewer and the size of the photograph questioning through the size of the image presented the photographic experience. The title of the article I perceived as essentially being a teaser, however, it never got to humor me through out the entire article. I wondered how can someone who I assume receives email and is part of modern society, not have been the recipient of at least two dozen penis enlargement offerings claiming that "Size does Matter" and thus made the connection between the title of that piece and the spam mail which has inundated all mailboxes from Argentina to Zambia and all the countries in between in the alphabet soup, by the billions, literally
As I read the article in further detail, I soon discovered why the author probably never made such a deliberate connection and the title simply wasn’t even an intentional pun. It turns out that in his rather well documented article the existence of the Internet as a source for viewing photographs is totally ignored. It would seem according to the examples presented by the author, that the only public places one has the option to look at pictures is in the context of either museums or gallery spaces
Strangely enough, even one of the photographers Mr. Batchen makes reference to, Seydou Keita from Mali, in relation to the various sizes of how his images were exhibited in the recent past, is a photographer we have featured in ZoneZero (here on the internet) for the past six years, yet the author seems not to be cognizant of this fact anymore than he is of the internet in general. I am sure that if he had included the existence of the pictures on the computer screen in his considerations of image size, his analysis would have benefited greatly.
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