Consider your giant print in the gallery:
"The viewing experience from close up is quite different from the viewing experience from a distance" - this is surely not a controversial statement? Dunderheadedly obvious seems more like it.
"One can get more of a sense of the print in a single glance from far away than one can close up" - I don't feel like this refinement is particularly problematic.
"The viewing experience from a distance can be seen as a kind of distillation, one gets less detail, but can grasp more of the gestalt, in an instant, than one can from close up" - starting to bump in to controversy here, perhaps? I think it's a reasonable statement, but not really unarguable. I happen to think it's correct, obviously.
"This distillation, when applied to a photograph of a real thing, can viewed as presenting perhaps a large scene as a single distilled digestible visual object, a distillation of the reality, in a sense" - now I think we're getting to the meat of my thesis, and arguments are likely to arise.
"this distillation is an essential photographic thing, and it represents an important way in which 'a photograph may look like a photograph'"
And thus we have arrived, by relatively easy steps, at the conclusion that indeed a large print may "look more like a photograph from farther away"