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Thread: Print prices.

  1. #1
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Print prices.

    Are established photographers who have developed a firm price for their silver or platinum prints in the market changing their pricing when supplementing their portfolio with inkjet prints? This is a real question for me this fall with a couple of shows and I am not inclined to price inkjets any different than traditional prints. Edition length is no different for me. From an effort point of view the inkjets are easier to reproduce in mass but the pre-production work is substantially more than the traditional prints. Everything I produce is as archival as possible within the limits of available technologies for a given media and that information is made avilable to the buyer. What are peoples thoughts?
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  2. #2

    Print prices.

    I went into a gallery one time and had this talk with the owner on pricing in his gallery. He said to me that you should take the price of the "hand crafted silver print" and take 1/5th of the price for a digital computer print.
    Now, I think this is abit steep, but personally...I would rather purchase a handmade silver print for X price, then a computer digital print for the same price.
    If I were doing both digital and silver, I would sell my digital prints for maybe 25% cheeper then my silver prints, mainly because they took less time, money and effort to produce.

    Ryan

  3. #3

    Join Date
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    Print prices.

    Kirk - I had this discussion with the last gallery I had representing me - we decided that they would not be priced differently provided that the size and edition were comparable.

    Confusing the customer was one concern. Forcing an issue that may not even exist in the purchaser's mind. And - as you mention - the equipment, expertise and time to print well just about equals out.

    I noticed at the Alan Labb show that his prints were all inkjet quadtones...I did not talk to the gallery owner about that issue - since I was busy trying to get my own prints up in there... :-) - but he might have some insight.

  4. #4

    Print prices.

    That's a tough one Kirk. I'd agree for the most the the inkjet print could be reduced from the pt/pd or maybe silver. Ryan suggested 25% less. People have always been willing to pay a premium for hand made goods as long as the quality was there. A pt/pd print may take a lot longer to make than the silver or inkjet, thus demanding a higher premium.....as long as the print was of decent quality. Hand made junk is another matter all together!

    I'd have to go with 25% less as there was probably more time involved to get the silver or pt/pd print just right as opposed to being able to do it quicker in Photoshop and the inkjet.

  5. #5
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Print prices.

    I'd say the same for the same size/edition

    There isn't necessarily a corrolation between how long it might have taken to make the print and how much you are selling it for (would you charge more for a print where the negative required you to hike 20 miles in to some mountain, then wait for three hours for the light to be right, compared to one where you jumped out of the car, camera was already on the tripod, set it up in two minutes and took the photograph in five or less?).

    It really depends as well what market you are pricing in as well? Arts and crafts/art fairs? Fine Art galleries? Internet galleries? etc etc. Some will place more value on the hand made craft aspect. Others will place more value on the artistic vision aspect with all sorts of variation in between. If prints are selling for $75 or $100 I would think the market will pay less for inkjet prints. If they are selling for $1000 to $3000 and up then they will probably be priced the same, if you see what I mean...
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  6. #6

    Print prices.

    All good points Tim. I guess we should just focus on the final product and how it appears when judging value.

  7. #7

    Print prices.

    If people are buying your prints because they like the content I dont think they will care how it was made. If people are buying your prints for collection and speculation then they might. I think you should discuss this with the gallery owner and ask him about his/her type of clientele.

    You know my feelings about ink jet posters, but I have to say that if digital is to become a medium on itself and that if those of us who demand ink jet printers stop the silly and misleading propaganda, then we should also give you the same respect other processes have. I would not price the ink jet prints lower, in the end people are buying your "talent" not the ink and paper.

    The only caveat I see is the issue of longevity. Regardless of what Wilhelm and Luttmann would like us to believe, it is not a 100% certain that ink jet prints will last 200 years, heck it is not certain they will last 50 years. What kind of warrantee you plan to offer? certainly you dont want to find yourself in the position Clyde Butcher found himself with the RC prints he made. So then, will the issue of longevity be a factor with those purchasing your prints? If you plant to offer a longevity of lets say 50 years, collectors might value the print less, if you plan to offer a 200 year warrantee and risk having to replace them sooner then the price should be the same as any other process.

    As I see it, if you are asking this then you do not have the confidence on the materials that you did with your previous work and you should think about this long and hard. If "the process does not matter, it is the end result that matters" then why price them lower? if the process does matter, at least in some manner, then price them lower.

  8. #8
    Resident Heretic Bruce Watson's Avatar
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    Print prices.

    What we do is photography. Photographic capture is done to either film or computer imaging chip. The original photograph is either a negative or positive film, or a computer file. Clearly, selling the original photograph is a non sequitur.

    What we can and do sell is prints from this photograph. How these prints get made is a decision by the artist. The artist should use the techniques that best fit his/her artistic vision, be they platinum, dye transfer, albumen, cyanotype, silver gelatin, carbon, inkjet, or any other kind of prints. No one way of making an image is inherently superior or inferior to any other. Each technique has its strengths and its weaknesses. In the end, it's about the image.

    You can price prints to whatever the market will bear. But IMHO, it's the image you are selling, and all other things being equal (editions, size, etc.) the image should sell for a given price regardless of technique.

    As an aside, my experience is the opposite of Ryan's. It takes me more time, money, and effort to make an inkjet print than it does to make a conventional darkroom print. Worse, the effort is made up front before any copies sell. That's especially painful for the images that don't sell at all, as some of them are wont to do. If I could make the prints I want to make in the darkroom, I surely would.

    Bruce Watson

  9. #9

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    Print prices.

    Inkjets are selling for top dollar in major markets, so why would you want to price them less than an old-fashioned silver print?

    Price for the market, above and beyond your overhead. Do you charge a residential customer the same price as a major international architecture firm for the same amount of work?

  10. #10

    Print prices.

    "All good points Tim. I guess we should just focus on the final product and how it appears when judging value."

    I suggest you try this on one of your buyers. Sell them an inkjet print for a certain price, and then as they are walking out the door, tell them that instead they could have purchased a comparable sliver gelatin or platinum print of the image for exactly the same price. See if they would like to stick with the inkjet print at that point.

    There is a (rightly) perceived value assigned to a handmade print that the buying market does not place on a machine print.

    In Kirk's situation, I think he needs to be very careful that he does not sell an inkjet print for anywhere near the price of a comparable silver gelatin print for two reasons. The biggest is that he doesn't want a buyer to come back six months later angry because they purchased an inkjet print when a silver gelatin print of the same image is available at a similar size and price.

    The second is that the inkjet prints devalue the handmade prints that he are making if they are the same price. He may feel the digital images take more work up front, but part of that has to do with the years he has spent in the darkroom vs. the relatively short time working in the digital medium.

    When it's all said and done, buyers value a handmade print more than a machine made print, and that is as it should be. Fine art photography is just as much about the object as it is about the image. It also is sometimes about the artist as much (or more, truthfully, anyone really want to look at one of those nasty Witkins?) as it is the object and image, but I don't believe you can remove the object from the equation for most buyers and most artists.

    ---Michael

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