I've always been keen on the grand gesture to make a statement. The quality has always come first but when it comes to location, the billboard has always meant more to me than the postage stamp. I had this idea knocked sideways in London yesterday and it's been on my mind ever since.

In a couple of months I'll be taking part in a show where I will have produced a set of photographs, portraits in fact, relating to the lives of elderly residents in my city. They will be part of a larger work which will trace the lives of these people using current technologies in a virtual map that follows the footsteps of their lives. In thinking about how to show these portraits, I had considered going larger than my standard exhibition size. In a way, I suppose I had been thinking in terms of a monumental display; black and white as opposed to my usual high saturation colour and sculptural rather than painterly in execution. Something that sings and shouts the achievements of these people's extraordinary journeys of life and death, of happiness and sadness, of fears and hopes.

But then that got thrown out of the window in the National Portrait Gallery yesterday as I looked at the Annie Liebowitz exhibit. I've always liked her... She was a bit of a hero to myself and my peers when I was a student as in those days she was not the famous celebrity photographer of Vogue, but the shoot from the hip photographer of Rolling Stone Magazine... following that magazines namesakes on the tour bus, the Rolling Stones at work and play, Leica rangefinder in hand... each excess captured in rolls and rolls of Tri-X.

So that was the Annie I was looking for. But what I got was something very different. There is Nicole Kidman onstage, bathed in lights that cascade down her ballgown - a very large photograph that screams celebrity. But nearby to it, almost the size of a postcard, the photograph of Liebowitz's lover, Susan Sontag, terminally ill and being carried on a plane in a vain attempt to get treatment to save her. A powerful and heartbreaking photograph that is almost too painful to look at. But people were looking. They were clustering around it in fact and peering to see and it made me think of the power of Dutch miniature paintings, of Victorian mourning lockets, of the power of the minute things that we miss everyday in our lives because we are not looking at the details close enough to see the bigger picture that could overwhelm us at any moment... Would this photograph have been as or more powerful if it had been printed at a larer size? No. I think she got it right. The act of peering is also the act of taking time to stand still and look harder and as for my own photographs - well, I'm now looking for some smaller frames for them.