Returning to the Brownie format
The photographs that came out of this Kodak Brownie camera from the 1930s may be the best size ever found.
Our photographer writes:
Of course there’s no objective answer to how big a picture is, or should be. You can see tiny icon photos on your social media accounts, and there are photo-posters covering large buildings. But if we turn our attention to the physical size of most pictures (since the beginning of photography, anyway), especially pictures taken and shared by people who are not professional photographers, the answer is surprisingly restricted.
In the days of glass plates, the size of the picture was the size of the negative. Not only were enlargers rare and expensive (more costly than the cameras, themselves anything but cheap), the light-sensitive emulsions were very slow. To make prints most photographers used sunlight! In addition, the lenses and emulsions were limited in their ability to record fine detail. So the final picture was as big as what came out of the camera.
There were a number of standard sizes of glass plates. The smallest that seems to have been used directly (not counting magic-lantern slides) was 3-1/2 inches by 2-1/4. But 4 x 5, 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 were also popular, as well as those based (I understand) on the English standard size for window glass, 8-1/2 by 6-1/2 inches. A “quarter-plate” camera thus made images about twice the size of the smallest. The bigger the plate, the more you could see in the picture; but the camera was more expensive and the outfit heavier. Photographers would balance their ambitions against their budget and the strength of their shoulders. The smaller sizes were more numerous, but there was always a diversity.
Then came the roll-film revolution. By simplifying the cameras enormously and coating the light-sensitive emulsion on flexible plastic Kodak aimed to make everyone a photographer. But enlarging was still mainly for specialists and richer customers, so the size of the negative remained the size of the print for most people. The picture had to be big enough to see, but small enough so the camera was still easy to manage. A Brownie like the one at the top of this post took eight pictures on roll of 620 film, each 6 by 9 centimeters (close enough to the familiar 3-1/2 by 2-1/4 inches not to be worth arguing about). There was some variety, but this was the common size for everyone’s photo album.
Eventually came the Leica and 35mm “miniature” cameras. Great improvements in film and lenses and in the economics of enlarging meant you could make your picture much larger than the negative. (It also meant that you needed a magnifying glass to see anything on the negative itself!) The standard one-hour-photo lab would give you a stack of 4 x 6-inch prints, so this became the most common size of photograph. You could enlarge the ones you really liked to 8 x 10 or even larger, but those were unusual.
Now almost everyone uses a digital camera, most of them with a much smaller sensor than 35mm film. But electronic enlargement is easy; we can make the pictures any size we want with (literally) a wave of the hand. What size do we make them? Almost always, just the size of a smartphone screen. Measuring the official Five Colors S&T smartphone screen, I find it’s 6.5 x 10 cm. Allowing for a bit of a border, we’re back at the 620 Brownie size. This is after a century of fantastic technological change. Could this be the natural size for a photograph?
