Sizegiver

A visual catalogue of found photographs capturing ubiquitous demonstrations of scale.

A sizegiver is an object placed into a photograph to enable judgement of another object’s size or scale. Sizegivers are mass-produced, designed objects which are iconic and familiar but also commonplace and at-hand. This ubiquitous fame gives them two functions - as consumer product and part-time model. Sizegivers create object-object relationships which communicate scale faster than a ruler, whilst providing a sense of colour and depth to an image. These object-object relationships are often strange, playful and unusual.

People use sizegivers to configure their understanding of the stretchy, immaterial terrain of digital space. Sizegiving is a people’s practice, used informally by niche communities and established organisations alike - from Reddit discussion threads, eBay sellers and gardening bloggers to articles from governments, museums and space agencies. In addressing an online public, sizegiving is becoming an international visual shorthand to describe the meaning of images.

This book is an archive of sizegivers in use, displayed at 1:1 scale. Sizegiver 1 includes: coin, bottle cap, paperclip, matchstick, ping-pong ball, golf ball, tennis ball, baseball and coke can.