Ok Peter Lik is a guy that's not short of a bob(£) or two....how does he do it? Limited or open? If limited I bet he won't be destroying any negs soon!
Selling at a lower price-point, but more people displaying your work.
Selling at a higher price-point, to less clientele
Selling at a "very" high level. Only the well-heeled apply.
Ok Peter Lik is a guy that's not short of a bob(£) or two....how does he do it? Limited or open? If limited I bet he won't be destroying any negs soon!
'Life is tough, but its tougher when you're stupid' John Wayne
Lik's editions are limited to 950. Pretty meaningless. He moved to digital years ago.
If you have the type of work that can sell in masses, don't over look the reproduction licensing segment. I do it thru a company that sells thru Walmart, Kmart, Sears, Overstock, Amazon, ex. It's a nice quarterly check & statement of what sells and continues to grow. It's a segment I would not be marketing to myself.
My direct marketing is localized to Wash DC with my buying demographic being age 40+ with $1M+ in assets. They only buy prints 40 inches & larger for themselves. Smaller stuff is bought as gifts for others.
In my opinion, living in a market that can support the work is key. Know who your buyers are so you can target market & not waste time.
With respect to everyone.
I hate the whole concept of editions. I find it downright offensive. This past month we had a discussion of droit-de-suite. If one doesn't have droit-de-suite, which we all agree does not work, and you edition something to 5, then you allow collectors to make all the money on your efforts. By the time an image becomes known enough to be valuable, you will have none of it.
It isn't that I dislike collectors, or don't want to protect them in some way. I do. However, there is a much better way to do it... In the last century there was a practice of selling portfolios, which was a collection of 10-15 prints in a nice box. They were valued as a set. It might be that in the future a portfolio gained in value, or it might be that a single image, or 2 or 3, would gain in value. The collector could then realize their return on the investment. This way, no one loses.
As much as we don't have droit-de-suite, it is also true that most photographers, given the right conditions of lack of funds, might sell another print of an image that was editioned. In fact, an edition printed in 16x20 can be printed at 16x21 without breaking the contract.
I do see both perspectives. However, as an artist, I see no reason why a collector, a gallery, or a museum, would want to limit my ability to make an income - to feed my family, buy more film and do more work, or anything else relating to one's personal finances. Having stepped back and looked at this from a purely business perspective, I think any artist that would agree to this is nuts. I think to ask such a thing is inappropriate, rude and immoral.
I understand that there are types of art that are more ephemeral, performance art, for example. However, i am actually trying to make art that is worthwhile and lasting. People at a much later time will decide if I have succeeded at all, or whether they are interested. (Likely not.)
There are plenty of movies about 'indecent proposals' of one form or another. If someone tells me that they will give me some amount for my next years income, or worse, for my income in 10 years time, I will turn it down. I want to believe in possibility, I want to believe that things will get better as I hopefully figure out how to do life better. I do not want to be a slave in the future. This is what this creates, almost every time. It's a disgusting part of the industry that should be dismissed out of hand.
Just my opinion,
Lenny
EigerStudios
Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing
Editions benefit the gallery, not the photographer. If you are both, then fine. If you are selling prints for $40,000 each then, fine.
Otherwise, consider just dating your prints with the print date--and keeping track of how many there are, especially of the early ones. Collectors will mainly be interested in those earlier prints. They won't care if you start printing a bunch more ten years later--in fact it will make their print even more valuable. Your interests and those of the collector are aligned.
--Darin
Didn't the whole limited edition thing really start with 'mechanical' artist prints - etchings, stone lithographs, gravure, etc. - where there is an actual physical limit to the number of good impressions possible before the stone or plate deteriorates? Seem to recall hearing that in freshman Art Appreciation....
Also, re. photo editions of one: years ago, heard of one guy who dry mounted the bare neg to the back of the mount board to give absolute assurance that no one - not even the buyer - could ever make another.
Lik's marketing strategy is showroom samples - not a gallery of what you are actually getting shipped - that is printed to size and mounted on demand. The original chrome is meaningless, since these images are so drastically altered in PS that they might have well been done in Hollywood. Editioning is also meaninless, since the whole marketing strategy involves only one key ingredient: suckers. But editioning per se is really geared to something which can be mass produced. It it is a genuine lithograph, the stone or plate simply wears out at a certain point, same for a set of dye transfer matrices. I find the whole concept idiotic when it comes
to anything printed by hand. Peter Lik, Ikea = the same thing. One is hyper-expensive, the other hyper-cheap. Aesthetically, Ikea is better, so go figure.
I think there is a difference with prints from any type of press.... one can make 5000 impressions and that might lower the value a bit. I think most artists would find a happy medium between them and their collectors.
As to the single print edition with the neg on the back, that is also a fallacy. Anyone can take a picture of a print and make another, or in today's world, just scan it, or scan the image before cutting it up into pieces and including it in an envelope on the back. There is really no way to protect against duplication. Just ask Sherrie Levine.
Lenny
EigerStudios
Museum Quality Drum Scanning and Printing
A duplicate is not an original print, so someone taking a picture of your print then reproducing it themselves is categorically not reproducing that print itself, but
merely a generic image. No different than someone sitting in a movie theater pirating it with some little video camera propped up on a chair seat. Any fool can
detect it's a fake. I realize that a lot of today's digi images are so poor in the first place that it is difficult to tell what is what. Some people are even making prints of web screen images like Google Earth then framing them, and yeah, some pathetic curator out there is going to display that kind of nonsense. So what. Most of us are not in that kind of category to begin with, and anything pirated will stand out like a sore thumb. And I doubt that even really good inkjet prints can be duplicated at will just anytime whenever at ideal quality, in unlimited quantities. If I wanted to make posters, that what I'd offer, not real prints.
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