Musings on Photography

Substitute ‘artistic’ for ‘literary’ and I think that pretty much sums it all up.

Andrew Ilachinski has an interesting post on his blog, Tao of Digital Photography, about this podcast from Brooks Jensen’s Lenswork podcast series.

Andrew summarizes:

Brooks Jensen, editor of Lenswork, recently posted a humorous podcast entitled “That’s Not What We Do” in which he recounts an incident while shooting in a park with a friend. He and photographer Joe Lipka were photographing at Fort Warden, WA. At some point, Joe went to the tourist center and got noticed by the woman at the service counter, who inquired about what he and Brooks were doing. Upon explaining that they were both photographers, the woman suggested they talk to the park manager, who was interested in buying some tourist shots to sell. Joe politely explained that neither he nor his other photographer friend take those kinds of pictures. Seeing that the woman was puzzled by his answer - after all, he is standing there with a bunch of camera equipment; what would all that gear be used for if not “taking pictures”? - Joe offered a the following line (that I suspect is familiar to most fine-art photographers placed in a similar situation): “We make pictures that don’t look like pictures of what we’re taking pictures of.” I only wish I were there to see the look of confusion on the poor woman’s face!

I guess it’s funny. I’ll admit I’m not so sure the joke isn’t on the photographers, though.

Here’s the deal from my point of view. I see three points that Lipka made:

1. We’re artists. We do stuff that doesn’t look like what you expect. That’s what makes it art.
2. You and the park manager aren’t artists. We know what you want, and you don’t want art, and you wouldn’t understand what we do because we’re artists and you’re not supposed to understand it.
3. We think the fact that our behavior confused you demonstrates that you’re an inferior person. (if you listen to the podcast, note that Jensen called the worker at the customer service desk a ‘gal’ and listen for his patronizing chuckle.)

Wow. Even more amazing to me, Jensen seems to think the entire episode is funny, which given Jensen’s views on making art at Real People Prices strikes me as hard to understand.

Is art photography really limited to photographs that don’t look the things they’re photographs of? Is it really true that that’s not what we do? I don’t think so.

Why did Jensen’s friend think that the park manager wouldn’t be interested in their art? If I were a park manager, and people were making art in my park, I would want to see the art. I might want to display the art in the visitor center. I might want to have a permanent collection of the art, at the park. If I were a park manager and liked the park I managed, I might want to buy art made in the park or about the park in my own art collection.

But no. Jensen’s friend decided (and Jensen apparently agreed), without any evidence at all, that the art they made wasn’t what the park manager wanted. It’s as if they’re defining art as “stuff nobody would want”. And they view this attitude, constructed entirely in their minds and quite probably wrong, as a good reason to laugh at the confusion they generated in this park employee who was, perhaps, trying to clue them in to the fact that the park manager might want to look at their art.

No wonder people think artists are a bunch of arrogant jerks who look at the rest of humanity with sneering condescension. People think that about artists because, in fact, some artists are arrogant jerks who look at the rest of humanity with sneering condescension.

No wonder there’s no market for art, and the general populace doesn’t care about art. Artists have defined what they do as ’stuff no one would care about’.

Jensen and his friend had the chance to take the artistic risk of being understood. They chickened out. All they did instead was confirm everyone’s worst stereotype of the arrogant artist. Everyone came out a loser.

It just makes me want to say bad words.

Some time ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be at a little talk given by the playwright Amy Freed, who at the time had just had her wonderful play The Beard of Avon produced at the Seattle Rep. After the talk, someone asked Amy about the support she’d gotten for her playwriting, and she said

The support I’ve been given has enabled me to take the biggest risk an artist can take - the risk of being understood.
-Amy Freed

I’ve thought about Amy’s statement a lot since I heard her speak way back in 2001. I think she’s put her finger directly on a big issue for the art world.

There’s a lot of art out there which, to borrow Amy’s phrase, doesn’t exactly run the risk of being understood. The artist stepped up to that risk, and then blinked and backed down. There are a lot of artists making art that’s not only not understandable, but isn’t meant to be understood.

I’m not talking about ambiguity. John Patrick Shanley wrote a beautiful, wonderful play titled Doubt, about an ambiguous situation where it appears as if a child has been molested by a priest. The play is deliberately written so that there is no authoritative answer to the question “Is the priest guilty?” Instead, that issue is left ambiguous, and we (as the audience) are forced to consider what we do when we aren’t sure but the stakes are very high if we make a mistake. Shanley’s play is not just ambiguous. It’s about ambiguity and how we respond to it. The play is both ambiguous and eminently understandable.

My fear of that risk is one of the reasons why I tried so hard to force myself to make my SoFoBoMo process be as open as I could stand. Posting my contact sheets felt pretty darn risky. There’s a strong urge to hide your mistakes, and I wanted to experiment and see what would happen if I forced myself to just put there out there in the open and let people look right at it all. I know that other people shared the sense that publishing the contact sheets for every single exposure I made was a risk, because the delay between my hitting ‘publish’ on that first contact sheet post and a friend calling me on the phone to say “What, have you lost your mind?” was about ten minutes. One of the things I wanted to do through SoFoBoMo was get past that fear of being understood.

Anyway, for me this fear was the big hurdle to getting the SoFoBoMo book done. There was a definite point in the process, when I was making the fundamental decisions about what the book would actually show, and it could go one of two ways. It could be a nice safe book of photos, with no text or just bland text. The other option was to go ahead and share more deeply about what my experience was actually like - order the photos and write text in a way that makes it clear what I actually thought and felt. The first book doesn’t run the risk of being understood. The second one embraces it.

I’m not saying that my book was a huge risk. It’s not sharing earth-shattering thoughts. And, truth be told, it probably doesn’t share as deeply or completely as it could, both because I backed off a bit and because it’s not always easy to make yourself be understood. But I did manage to not back off at the moment of that critical decision, and I think that taking that small risk made a big difference in the outcome. I’m a lot happier with the book I finished than I would be if I hadn’t taken that chance.

I’ve long pondered the whole issue of copyright and public discussion forums - when you make a post, do you retain the copyright? There have been a few outright usurpations of content that I remember - photo.net pretty much copied the entire content of the discussion forum at www.largeformatphotography.info at one point as it transitioned away from Philip Greenspun’s non-profit thingie into the photo.net we see today. That’s one reason I never got involved in the community at photo.net - why contribute content when someone else is reaping the rewards?

So, with that to establish context, go read this article, about the rights of the people who made musical contributions to bebo.com. Ok, done that? Did you read the whole thing? Fine.

Now, let me just suggest that you read the article again, and this time, hold the word ‘flickr’ in your mind as you read.

Hmmm. Lots of content, there. Lots of pageviews. Not much compensation. Hmm.

Let us say that art is art only when it is in a mind, either at the creating or the beholding it creates (when it is successful), a new ordering of the mind. At this point, whenever it occurs, it is art - that is, it is functioning.

Elton Bennett (From Elton Bennett - His Life and Art, by Archie Satterfield)

I got a copy of this book from the library after MIke Mundy mentioned him in this comment. From reading the book, Bennett sounds like quite the individualist, steadfastly swimming against the ‘art establishment’. Such things are hard to judge from just the one viewpoint provided by a single book, of course, but I imagine that Bennett’s steadfast insistence that his prints sell for no more than $15 probably had something to do with the rejection and heat he took from the galleries. That and the fact that Bennett doesn’t seem to have been a person who had a very tolerant view of anything he saw as pretentious behavior.

What I found interesting is that Bennett seems to have slowly built up his distribution channel until he was dealing with retailers all over the country and having difficulty dealing with the workload his sales imposed. And he did all this back when the internet and the www were not yet even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

The book is pretty breezy and loose, as opposed to being a dusty tome of scholarly effort, but a sense of the sort of person Bennett was and the philosophy that brought him to his decision to produce art that sold at prices average people could afford come through very clearly. Nice reproductions of Bennett’s work, as well.

Some time back, Doug Stockdale wrote an interesting post stating that

Up to recently, my web gallery read ‘Douglas Stockdale, Fine Art Photographer’, but now, I have deleted the ”Fine Art” in front of the Photographer subtitle. Just ’Photographer’. When I came back to photography, I had the same insecurity as many others, that is, if you are not sure that what you see (of my photographs) constitutes ‘art’, let me help you and reassure you that I am indeed an ‘artist’. Oh, by the way, painters are really no different, they are just as insecure as the rest of us (I am not a house painter, but a painter of houses), so don’t think that this is just a photo hang-up!

So why the change now? Part of this is getting comfortable in my own skin. Part is getting my series Bad Trip - Sad Trip published in LensWorklast month. The last part is reading David Vestal’s column in the March issue of Photo Techniques about Improper Nouns. And yes, it’s all about the use of the ‘fine art’ words. To summarize two pages, if you have to actually tell someone you are a fine artist, what does that say about you and them??

Those words stuck in my head, and I was vaguely thinking about writing my thoughts about all this but never quite got my thoughts sufficiently gelled to write them down. Or I didn’t try to write them down, so they never gelled. One or the other.

And then when I was reading Writing Past Dark I bookmarked the following passage:

“Why do we seek fame?” a student asks the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, according to a book entitled Think on These Things.

Have you ever thought about it?” he responds. “We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don’t love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not… Our present eduction is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I’m confident there are people who are doing things and want to become famous for doing them and yet love what they are doing intensely. Humans are competitive by nature and can’t turn it off even when doing something we love. That said, I do think that this passage highlights something significant and meaningful.

I can’t help observing that although I continue to exhibit work, and I continue to think hard about ways to get my work in front of people, I feel a lot of conflict about that.

Part of that conflict is that the population I’m most interested in having as an audience and buyer of my work is apparently NOT the Art World Approved sort of audience - instead it’s the people who actually live in the places I photograph. Apparently Real Artists are only interested in the common man as a subject, never as an audience. To that idea, I say “Fooey.”

And another part of the conflict I feel is that, as a general thing, I don’t much enjoy the whole showing my work thing. I’m not saying I want to take my work and hide it under a bushel, nor am I saying that showing my work is utterly without reward. What I’m saying is that those rewards aren’t the big rewards. The big rewards are being out and about with the camera, and being at home in the workroom editing, developing, and printing the photos. I’ve always had a bit of a problem when someone asked me “What do you do with all the photos you make”, until one day I learned to take a page from the quilt world, and answer that question with “You don’t ask someone who collects Hummel Figurines what they do with all those figurines, do you?”

I know that everyone gets discouraged at times, and that validation can help us ride out those rough periods of discouragement. But I think it’s a shame that the validation comes from our attempts to earn the “Fine Artist” merit badge and not from a community of people who just think that in general making art as a day to day thing can make our lives a bit more interesting and pleasant.

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?

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?

In my email-box this morning, compliments of Craig Barber’s excellent mailing list:

Today Pro-Imaging has launched a campaign targeted against all those organisers and sponsors of photographic competitions that are merely rights grabbing devices.

A press release has been issued to photographic media and organisations throughout the world and we are assured that our story will be carried in at least one major photographic news outlet in the U.K. and in another in the U.S. The press release can be read here -

http://www.pro-imaging.org/content/view/201/150/

We are undertaking to supply to the world a consumer report whereby we test photography competitions against a set of conditions embodied in our Bill of Rights for Photographers. Competitions with T&C’s that fail any of our tests result in the sponsor being notified of their failure, and given seven days to adjust their rules.

Clive Bubley
(Member of Pro-Imaging.org)

I’m sure that some contests are on the up and up, although I think people should be mindful of what they’re after as well as what the real costs are when entering even legitimate contests. Efforts like this one seem like a good thing.

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.