Collecting

I know a lot of people who want an art collection. I know some pretty wealthy folks who have significant collections. But mostly the reason why most folks don’t collect art is that, generally speaking, folks think you need to buy art to collect it. And most folks, frankly, are not awash in disposable income. And, to add to the conundrum, most people have the idea that with art, price is a reliable indicator of quality. I’ll grant that, in a sideways sort of way. I’ll agree that price is positively correlated with quality, in that art that is priced higher, generally speaking, is better.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been viewing photography websites on the web. And while I won’t say that I was always amazed at the work, I will say that I saw an awful lot of really good work. There are a lot of people making good art out there. No, let me rephrase that – there are a staggeringly large number of folks making great art out there. They’re making staggering quantities of great art. And, as a first order approximation, zero percent of that art gets collected, because it never gets sold. In some cases, it’s not for sale because the photographer doesn’t want to part with it, but I suspect that in most cases, the reason it’s not for sale is that the photographer realizes, as I did, that while the work would sell, it’s never going to sell in quantities that make it worth trying to make money from it. Life is short, and we’re not going to invest our lives in selling the art when we’d rather be making it.

The significant thing is this: for art which is not for sale, price is obviously not correlated with quality. Take a moment and think about that. What it means, bottom line, is this: there’s a whole, huge pile of art, ranging from completely without merit to soul-shatteringly good, and the price is not a reliable indicator of quality, for the simple reason that the work is all not for sale. And it’s not for sale, not because the artist isn’t willing to part with it, but because the artist isn’t willing to put up with the hassles of selling it just to score some money.

Wouldn’t it be cool to build an impressive collection of art, with all of the art collected from little known artists, with all of the art acquired either free or in exchange for either an artwork or a charitable donation? Would it be interesting if someone built a photography collection not by buying prints, but just by asking for them, and photographers just making it a gift?

Disposable

Niels Henricksen comments:

If I were sell a print for $5.00 then I think most buyers only place a $5.00 or less value on it (don’t we all overcharge anyway) and therefore to them the print may seem more like a poster and somewhat disposable.

If I charge $300, then buyers would recognize, only by monetary standards, it as having greater value and they would treasure it more.

So, here’s a story from a photographer I greatly admire, Jay Dusard. He was photographing cowboys, and his practice was that he would work with the cowboys, and then during the rest times, he would photograph them, and then he would give them prints. These cowboys lived what might politely be described as a rustic lifestyle, and so Dusard would show up for another round, and he’d find his ‘Fine Art Archival Gelatin/Silver Prints” which he sold for hundreds of dollars stuck to the wall next to the stove with a thumbtack, coated with grease, but clearly placed for primo visibility and enjoyment.

I heard a similar story from John Sexton when I took a workshop from him, this time about his space shuttle photographs and the people who worked on them. Sexton would give them prints, and the engineers would tape them to file cabinets, tape them to walls, and so on.

And, I admit, I am enough of an egalitarian to think that everyone deserves to have nice in their life and surroundings. When I was selling prints in a booth at a local fair in the valley above which I live, I was dismayed when someone told me a woman had come by several times to look at one of my prints, clearly wanting to have it, but saying she was unable to afford it. This, after I had lowered my prices for the fair by about 50% hoping to make them more affordable.

Suppose our inkjet prints were, truly, disposable. Suppose people paid minimal prices for them, stuck them to the wall with thumbtacks or to the fridge door with tape, enjoyed them for a while, and then discarded them.

Why, exactly, do we think this would be bad?

Print Sales

It’s a new year. In particular, it’s approaching the middle of January, and here in Washington State, that means I need to file the Business and Occupation tax for the photo business I have. I’ve been putting it off, but it won’t take long. I go online, log in to the web site for the Secretary of State, go to the business section, and fill out my quarterly filing by checking the box for ‘no business activity’. Amazingly, the fact that I have made NO money means that I owe no tax, and thus I’m done for another three months.

And the reason I’ve done no business is that some time ago, along with the decision to not teach classes or workshops for money, and the decision to not do printing for other folks in exchange for money, I made the decision to stop selling prints. It’s not that there was no demand – I’ve been selling a small number of prints each year. I’ve sold enough prints to pay for the printers I print them on and the cameras I take them with, with the result that my photo activity has been breaking even. But the amount of money wasn’t worth it.

So instead of selling prints, I’ve got a new policy. If someone wants a print, I’ll happily discuss various arrangements. If I like their photography, maybe we could swap prints. Or I might give them a print in exchange for them making a contribution to some charity. Or, perhaps, if I am in just the right mood, I’ll just give them a print, free.

I mean, why not? It’s not like my costs are large. It’s not like it takes me a lot of time to make another print if I’ve already made one. If I can make the world a nicer place by giving away prints, why not do it?

Low Print Prices, the History

There are a fair number of comments on yesterday’s post on Size and Price which comment, not on the the strange relationship between size and price, but instead on the whole idea of low prices.

To simplify things I’ve added a ‘Print Pricing” category. You can read every post I’ve written on the subject (including, along the way, responses to most of the arguments advanced against very low print prices) by reading the entire series of posts.

Here are a couple more thoughts on low print prices which so far have not drawn much comment:

1. What about the idea that even folks without much disposable income deserve to have a bit of nice in their lives? I’ve been rather startled at the degree to which photographers, many of whom seem to tilt toward the liberal end of the political spectrum, seem absolutely determined to price all their art at a level where only the wealthy can own it. In this comment, Mike Mundy points out printmaker Elton Bennett, who apparently preferred selling more prints at a lower price and who never sold a print for more than $15 in his life. Was Bennett crazy?

2. There are aspects to selling artwork at a low price that can be appealing. Diversification is one – if your prints are priced low enough that the average Joe can afford to buy not just one but several, your potential customer pool is larger. There’s less invested, risk wise, in a single patron. On the other hand, if you sell your work into a pool of a dozen wealthy art collectors, the risk that you’ll do something to alienate a substantial fraction of that pool of patrons becomes significant. When your artwork changes a bit, you risk stepping outside the zone where your current patrons will buy. That’s bad. If you have thousands of patrons, the risk that you’ll leave them all behind in one fell swoop is substantially lower. To what extent do the folks who sell just into the wealthy crowd limit the work they do to match the upscale wealthy market? If you make ‘edgy’ work, would you find a much deeper market if your work was priced one or two orders of magnitude lower?

Size and Price

Pretty much everywhere you look, bigger art costs more than smaller art.

For an illuminating example, take a look at the very interesting website www.20×200.com [hat tip: Adam’s very interesting comments on this post].

The 20×200 project is about making art affordable. To that end, it sells art in three editions, differentiated by size. These editions are:

• small: roughly 8×10, edition size 200, price $20
• medium: roughly 17×22, edition size 20, price $200
• large: roughly 30×40, edition size 2, price $2000

I think that’s pretty interesting, and I learned a lot of interesting stuff by browsing back through the various offerings and noting how many of each size sold.

At this point, I don’t have any conclusions from all this. Just an interesting observation.

Here are my Cost of Goods Sold for three sizes of print, printed on my HP Z3100 on Crane Museo Portfolio paper:

• 6″x9″ : $2.11
• 14″x21″: $6.64
• 20″x30″: $12.87

That’s just the cost of consumables. I’ve not included wear and tear on the printer, nor have I included the cost of the time it takes me to sit down, load paper, push buttons, pack the print for shipping, etc. When I add in my costs for my time, I get a price scale that looks like this:

• 6″x9″ : $19
• 14″x21″: $24
• 20″x30″: $30

Now, what’s interesting is that when I add in the cost of my time, I get a price for the smallest print which is not very different from the cost 20×200 charges for their smallest print. But when we bump up the size, the 20×200 price jumps by a factor of ten. My price jumps by about $5, because that’s the difference in cost for me to crank out the larger print. It basically boils down to more ink and more paper. And when we take the next bump in size, the 20×200 price jumps by a factor of ten again, and my price jumps by about $6. The 20×200 price is now about 67 times more expensive than what I plan to sell a 20″x30″ print for.

If you go and look at the 20×200 web site, they’re not just offering big prints for these higher prices. If you believe what they’re saying about how many prints they’ve sold in the various editions (and I see no reason not to believe them), they’re actually selling them at these prices.

Now, I understand that they’re using product differentiation to sell similar but slightly different products at a set of prices that span a wide range, and they’re doing that so that they can snap up what in the pricing world is called ‘consumer surplus’. I understand that if someone has $2000 in their pocket to spend on one of my prints and is willing to spend the entire $2000 to get that print, and I sell it to him for $30 I’ve essentially left $1970 in his pocket instead of putting it in mine. Let’s ignore that problem for a second. It’s an interesting issue and I’ve not fully thought all that through, although I’d point out that there’s nothing stopping me from selling that guy 67 different prints at $30 and having a very happy customer.

No, there’s a different question on my mind, and it comes from the fact that 20×200 are using the same reproduction technique I’m using (inkjet printing) and if their volume is larger than mine, their COGS is certainly lower than mine. It’s not like their costs to produce that large edition print are a factor of 100 higher than their costs for the smallest print. My question, really, is this: why are people willing to actually pony up $2000 for that large print? Is it just that they’re unaware that the cost to produce the small print is 2 bucks (about 20% of the sales price) but that the cost to produce the largest print is something like $13 (and thus less than 1% of the sales price)?

I suspect that some of this has to do with tradition. A big painting costs much more than a small painting because it takes the painter longer to make the large painting than the small one. And buyers haven’t really come to grips with the fact that when it comes to buying SOME kinds of art, the cost of goods sold is now very low, and so they haven’t really adjusted their expectation of price.

When I started making big prints, a lot of my photographer friends told me the advice they got in school was “If you can’t make it better, make it bigger”. They told me bigger isn’t necessarily better. They told me that smaller prints suited their artistic vision, and that size wasn’t important. And then they went and sold different sized prints, and guess what – they priced the bigger prints higher. On the one hand, they’d say that size didn’t matter, and then on the other hand, they’d say that size mattered a whole lot.

I find all this fascinating and confusing, and looked at from a purely production side point of view I don’t see a whole lot of reasons why a 20″x30″ print ought to be priced at 100x the price of a 6″ x 9″ print. What would happen if 20×200 inverted their pricing, and sold the smallest prints in the smallest edition size and the highest price, and the largest prints in the largest edition size and the lowest price? Would it suddenly become very fashionable to have very small prints on your walls?

Further Ruminations on Print Size

Several people have suggested to me that, if I have a print size preference, why not just sell that one print size?

The answer touches on why I’m getting ready to cut my print prices.

Here’s the skinny. I’ve been saying for some time now that I think that prints are, in general, priced higher than the optimum price point. It’s not an idea that’s new to me – Brooks Jensen has been saying much the same thing for years now. I’m not dependent on profit from print sales (and it’s a damn good thing, too, because if I did I’d be starving), and so I sort of let the issue float around in the back of my mind. But because I’ve started showing my work in the rural valley where I live, and the old print prices were set so high that most of my neighbors would never even consider buying a print, I started pondering exactly what my goals were.

One of the things I’d like is to move away from my prints being viewed as ‘extremely valuable art objects which must be treated with great care and deference’. Back when I was making gelatin silver prints in a wet darkroom, I was just like everyone else – prints were handled with gloves on (literally) and carefully mounted and protected in special boxes. When making a replacement for a print that gets damaged means hours in the darkroom, that’s a sensible view. But when I switched to digital printing, all those attitudes went out the window, because making a replacement print amounted to pressing a few buttons and waiting a few minutes. That attitude really solidified when I sent a print as a gift, just because a ten year old girl liked the photo, and I found myself encouraging the mother to let the ten year old girl do whatever she liked with the print – tape it to the wall, put it up with thumbtacks. I wanted this ten year old girl to be free to enjoy the print without all the ‘oh, this is valuable and fragile’ nonsense being loaded onto it. And about that time I realized that I’d like the same thing for adults, too. I’m less and less convinced that the whole ‘this piece of paper has been invested with the essence of my spirituality and thus you should pay a lot of money for it and henceforth treat it as a holy object’ business is a good thing for art in general.

So the net result of that line of thought is that I’m rethinking print prices, and I’m asking ‘How low can I go?’ We know a lot about what happens when we market art as ‘expensive sacred objects’, but we don’t actually know very much about marketing art as ‘inexpensive objects that delight’. We know a lot about marketing prints in expensive galleries to people who will have them archivally framed with UV blocking glass and hung with spectrally balanced halogen gallery lighting, but we know little about what happens when we sell the same sort of stuff to someone who will go home and put it on the wall with blu-tack or tape it to the refrigerator door.

All that just describes the evolution of my own attitude toward the print as an object. There’s a parallel change in my views about controlling how my work is presented. I started out wanting to rigidly control the presentation of my photographs. I wanted them matted a certain way, I wanted them framed a certain way, and I tried to control those variables when prints left my hands. I wanted to influence how people viewed my work, not only the physical appearance but their frame of mind when they looked. But in the end I realized that you can’t control those things – not really. More importantly, perhaps you don’t want to exercise that much control. Make the photograph, make the print, send it out into the world, and let it go. Once you send it out into the world, it has to sink or swim on its own merits, and you have to let people form their own view of it as good or bad, and you have to let them make their own interpretation of it.

The net result of all this is that I’d like to set the prices of my prints really low (but not lose money) and see what happens. I’m interested in how peoples attitudes about the work change with the change in price, and in how the change in price changes their relationship to the physical object. I’m also increasingly wary of trying to dictate too much detail about how my work is presented. If people want large prints, great. If they want small prints, that’s great too.

At the same time, I do want some constraints. I don’t want to sell lousy looking prints, even if it means the price can be lower. And I don’t want to sell prints that are so small that I think the image no longer works at that size (same thing for prints that are so large the don’t work). I’m just trying to work out the balance between giving people what they want and feeling good about what I sell.

Print Size/Small Prints/Print Pricing

Well, I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to do small prints any more. And then I read Oren’s comments, and of course, as Oren’s comments always do, the comments set me thinking about the merits of small prints.

You can hold them in your lap and look at them. You can put them in smaller spots on walls. You can have a bunch of them in a smallish box – a nice little collection you can take out and look at when you please. I’m not a big fan of small prints myself but I can easily see the appeal – especially the appeal of that small boxed collection of prints you take out now and then. I’m also not unaware that most of these small print properties are shared with books, which are sort of permanently organized collections of small prints. Maybe my small print offerings will all be books. Hmm.

So I don’t know. Maybe I’m adding some smaller print size (smaller than 10″x15″)) back into the mix. How small? I don’t know. How many sizes? I don’t know. I’m still thinking.

In part, part of my resistance to small prints has been that when people inquire about ‘smaller’ I find that what they’re really asking about is ‘cheaper’. But here’s my twist – I’m no longer going to price by the square foot. Instead, my prices are going to be flat across print size. That is, I’m going to net the same profit from each print, regardless of size. I’m trying to keep print costs down, and I’ve got solid figures on the cost of goods sold. As I’ve said before, I’m curious whether lower print prices will produce larger volumes, and so I’m going to try an experiment and see.

Anyway, the difference in COGS between a 10″x15″ print and a 20″x30″ print is just not that large – about $15. My prices will reflect exactly that difference. There are a few differences between selling a 10″x15″ print and a 20″x30″- one takes longer to print, one costs more to ship. But my goal remains to net the same profit from a sale, regardless of whether it’s a big print or a small print. And given that the price difference between a small print and a large print will be small, I’m wondering “if all prints are the same price, what size will people choose?” The largest, perhaps, because they feel like they’re getting a better deal. Or the size that fits best over their sofa, or the size that matches the refrigerator door with room for the tape holding it up.

It’s all still a confused jumble of thoughts, it seems. Still remaining is deciding what to do about the printing service I offer and what those prices should look like relative to the cost of prints of my own images.

But I do seem to be making some progress on some sort of coherent pricing scheme, with the prices set much much lower than the accepted standards.

One more time, with feeling (and three part harmony)

Some of the comments (and emails) provoked by my recent musings on print pricing and print sales have accused me of thinking that (as an artist) all you should think about is selling, selling, selling and making money, making money, making money.

I’d like to make my views on this perfectly clear, so I’m going to try hard to write this down in a way that cannot be misconstrued.

I think all people should make art. When I say ‘all people’, I don’t mean ‘all people’ as in ‘all people with great artistic skill’, I mean ‘all people’ as in ‘all living members of the species Homo sapiens’. That is, I believe that, if only everyone would spend a little bit of time making art, the world of people would be a nicer place. I think that virtually everyone’s life is improved by artmaking, and not just art spectating. I believe that when you’re doing it right, art is not a spectator sport.

I also think that, certain fields of artistic endeavor excepted, art should be made without concern over how well it will sell, or even whether it will sell at all. As a general thing, I think that restricting your artmaking to stuff that will sell is probably a soul-killling thing. To put it as plainly as I can, I think the big value in artmaking is not the final product, but the engagement of the art-maker in the process.

That said, once you have engaged in artmaking and you’re left with this artifact that’s a side effect of the process, I don’t see much reason why you shouldn’t try to sell the thing off for a bit of money either to defray expenses or to earn a living. And, once you’ve decided to sell things, I don’t see it as evil or bad to engage in a little thought about how you might sell it at the greatest profit possible.

Some comments have also suggested that I think that art galleries are bad. Again, let me try to write my views so plainly that they can’t be misinterpreted.

I think art galleries can be good or bad. One problem I have with art galleries is that they can’t take much risk – they must show what will sell, and they will only show stuff that they are quite certain they can sell. This is not because gallery owners are fascists, it’s because gallery owners want to be in business next month, so that they can show some more art. But this aversion to risk and requirement of making money imposes constraints on galleries – they can’t take much risk, they can only show art that is currently fashionable, and in general they must price to cover their overhead. And as a result, they can only deal in a narrow range of art, and they can only sell that art into a narrow market. Those two unfortunate facts are not caused by gallery owners being bad or evil or in any way less than stellar folks. They’re caused by the fact that, no matter how perfect the intentions and goals of the gallery owner, the gallery owner cannot suspend the laws of economics.

Finally, I think that the economics of the situation mean that art galleries may be a great fit for artists whose works are made in onesies, but that the same excellent art galleries may not be a great fit for photographers, whose art can now be made (with undiminished quality) in quantities ranging from tens to thousands.

I’ve also been accused of having ‘issues’ with the art world’.

I think that one side effect of the gallery system of art sales is that artists who are trying to get their work into galleries tend to engage in behaviors that they believe will make their art more saleable. Those behaviors are sometimes outrageous, sometimes hugely (and amusingly) conformist, and often both. Often the behaviors consist of ex post facto attribution of preposterous meaning to artworks, and attempts to justify outrageous value of artworks by unsupported attributing to them of various poorly defined qualities. Even worse, I believe that those behaviors are socially corrosive in the sense that they turn the larger public off and convince them that art and the art world are something they have no use for at all.

If this constitutes ‘having a problem with the art world’ then I plead very much guilty as charged.

Folks who think that what I’ve written here is some recent epiphany for me are encouraged to go read Art is a Verb, Not a Noun, People Don’t Buy Art and No One Buys Art Part II, and perhaps The Artist’s Way of Commerce.

Opportunities

Most of what I’ve written about print pricing has been prompted by my view that new technologies are providing photographers with new opportunities to market their work in new ways, at new prices, and reach new markets. I think that this explosion of choices about how to market our work and what markets we can try to sell into is a good thing. I also think that we’ve just seen the very beginning, and that not only will we see even more fundamental changes in the market for art photography, the changes that are coming will make the changes we’re currently experiencing look relatively minor.

Some folks see that all as a big threat. Some people see it as a big opportunity.

To the extent we can successfully draw analogies between the world of record labels and musicians and the world of galleries and photographers, I think that this article by musician David Byrne is particularly interesting.

Read the whole thing. Draw your own conclusions.

(side note: my trying to figure out what my new pricing will be continues apace. I’m getting a solid grip on my costs. ALL of my costs, sunk, fixed, and variable. I want to thank those folks who have posted constructive comments or sent me constructive email. I’ve deleted several comments that were less than constructive. I encourage those folks who feel they have something to say but find their comments don’t make it past my moderation to go, start their own blogs, and post their opinions in a place where they don’t face my increasingly stringent standards for what I’ll allow here.)

Print Pricing and Ego

Ken Smith wrote eloquently, expressing the idea that

Suppose you had no income other than your prints, and it was your business…just for a moment imagine. Yes, you committed to that business, because you love working for yourself, and you think you can make a living doing the fine art style of photography that you love. Then, you have no other way to live your life than to figure ALL the costs into your pricing. Remember, you have no other income coming in, but what you sell in your prints. That is simply business. How can you have expenses, without a way to pay for them?

I understand that professionals must cover all their expenses, including post-it notes and rubber bands and the electric bill.

My point, though, is this: the buyer does not care about your heat bill, or the cost of rubber bands, or even the cost of your printer. The buyer is buying an object, and what the buyer is willing to pay for it has a everything to do with demand for that object and the supply of it. We can alter the buyer’s demand (by advertising, or by giving a convincing story about the object), and we can alter the buyer’s perception of supply (by using limited editions and other gimmicks). I’d argue, though, that those alterations are minor.

Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Suppose we have an image, and we’re going to sell prints of it. We can set the price of the prints however we please. The higher we set the price, the fewer prints we sell. We make more profit per print, but eventually we reach a point where an increase in price results in so many fewer sales that we get less profit. On the other hand, if we reduce the price, we will sell more prints but make a smaller profit on each one. As we reduce the price, we eventually reach a point where the fall-off in profits more than offsets the increase in sales. There’s some range of prices, usually fairly narrow, where we can think of the price as ”optimum” – raising the price more results in less overall profit, and cutting the price also results in lower profits. I’m not articulating some weird arcane theory I’ve just invented, here. The laws of supply and demand are the most widely accepted part of modern economic theory, and have gone hundreds of years without significant revision. In the world of economics this is settled stuff.

So if we are being a business and must pay all our bills (as Ken suggests) then the sensible thing to do is to price our product as close to this optimum pricing as possible. I believe this optimum price is lower than the price at which virtually all fine art photography is currently being sold. My question, then, is “Why is so much photography priced well above this optimum?”

I believe there are a lot of reasons. One reason prices are set so high has to do with the pragmatics of the gallery system – galleries can only connect with a small number of customers, and thus they have to try to eke out the maximum profit from every sale. And so they want the prices high. (Note that this comment on a previous post specifically tells a story of a gallery raising a photographer’s prices because “I can’t make money on you at these prices”). Why is the gallery’s optimum different from the photographer’s optimum price? Because the photographer can increase the supply of the print as she pleases, but the gallery cannot increase the number of customers. This mismatch between the optimized economics of running a gallery and the optimized economics of being a photographer is much of why I think the gallery system of selling art is such a bad match for selling photography.

Another reason is photographer’s ego. Every photographer has had drummed into his head the idea that high print prices are good, and low print are bad. Note that we’re talking prices, here, and not profit! Why isn’t this generalization in the minds of photographers ‘high profits are good, low profits are bad’. Why is it that the test of a photographer’s (or, to be more general, an artist’s) merit is the price that can be commanded for a single print? That makes sense if everything you do is one off, but a photographer, especially today, can just as easily produce a hundred prints or a thousand prints as he can produce one. When the effort to make another good print was the same regardless of how many prints had already been made, the economics of photographer were a much better match with those of galleries. But today, for most photographers, the effort to make the first print is still high, but the effort to make the second (and hundredth) print is literally pushing a few buttons.

Somewhere along the line, we got distracted from what’s important to a business (which is increasing profits), and started fixating on price. All I’m suggesting is that photographers for whom the bottom line is all about money should orient their pricing, sales, and distribution around profits (which is what they should care about) and not price.

And because of this, a lot of a photographer’s ego is tied up in his pricing. To use David Ray Carson’s terminology, photographers want to be in the business of selling Ferraris not Fords, Lexuses not Toyotas, Porsches not Yugos. Furthermore, it seems to me that they are so invested in wanting to be seen as selling Lamborghinis and not Chevys that they will happily settle for lower profits.

Anyway, I just want to make it clear that when I advocate for lowering print prices, I’m doing so because I believe that the optimum price is well below the current pricing for most art photographers. I’m not arguing those photographers should settle for making less money; I’m arguing that they should lower their prices, buy into new distribution systems, and make MORE MONEY.

Because wouldn’t that be a good thing? More prints sold, more happy customers, a whole lot of people who currently can’t afford to buy prints suddenly able to buy them, and photographers with more money in their pockets?