Selling at craft markets - hard lessons learned.

[Tim Hyde]

Kevin-

Why do you keep comparing photography to painting? Why not ballet or film or sculpture? They are very different media with different traditions and different practitioners and, largely, different markets. We are photographers on this forum, not ballerinas.

I think you are also confusing the craft fair and tourist-gallery market with the fine-art world where photography sells in editions (almost without exception) for high prices and has never sold better. I am a collector and spend a great deal of time in these galleries and auction houses.

I can provide hundreds of examples, but I will just cite one. Hiroshi Sugimoto is hot right now, and produces his 20 x 24 silver gelatin prints in editions of 25. His work retails at around $18-20,000, but the editions sell out almost immediately. In the past 12 months 160 of his pieces have come up for auction in the secondary market. Excluding lithographs and looking only at the May and June auctions in NY and London, about 3 dozen pieces were up, and all sold for prices exceeding $29,000, most at more than $60,000, and almost a dozen at over a $100,000, topping out at $395,000. This is for a living photographer's contempary output.

Tim is exactly right when he says that it is the quality of the image that counts, along with a lot of luck, and knowing your market.

[tim atherton]

Tim is exactly right when he says that it is the quality of the image that counts, along with a lot of luck, and knowing your market.

Mind you, really crappy paintings will always sell pretty well - who was it who said: "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public"?

[Don Miller]

...................for high prices and has never sold better...................

Exactly right. There has never been more disposable income. It's about product, markets, and marketing.

I talked to a woman yesterday who was laughing at herself for spending $450 on three dog collars.

[paulr]

Exactly right. There has never been more disposable income. It's about product, markets, and marketing.

I talked to a woman yesterday who was laughing at herself for spending $450 on three dog collars.

If it were that simple, you'd expect that the highest prices paid for painting would have increased at the same rate as the highest prices paid for photographs. And I don't believe this is the case at all.

[Ted Harris]

A few comments to take the thread back to its beginnings. As msot of you know I make all of my living from photography and photography related activities. Some from fine art prints, some from writing, some from workshops and some from commercial work. I am jus starting to get ready for the 2007 Christmas season, the only time I sell my work at "fairs" and I do it then because the past 7 years have shown that it can be reasonably lucrative. For Christmas Fairs I produce hundreds of boxes of notecards. They are all high quality, all personally printed on either an Epson R800 or HPB9180 using pigment inks. I have found that, while my profit margins aren't as high doing this and it is more work intensive than having the cards commercially printed, they also sell better than those that are commercially done. I have sold out or nearly sold out all the cards I produced for the past 3 years. The total sales are not a huge amount of money but they are substantial enough for me to keep doi9ng it. Additionally, the traffic past my works almost always leads to sales of larger framed prints for hundreds of dollars each and to commissions.

Threads like this pop up several times a year and the bottom line is always the same. You need to work hard to promote and sell yourself and your work.

BTW, the sale of a single card for $3-5 to a lady in her 90's is just as important to me as the sale of a major piece. I am happy that I can do this for a living. I am also happy that my realizaation of a vision of mine, even if it is one that sold for a couple of bucks, is now sitting in someone else's home and bringing them joy.

[riooso]

Thank you very much Ted for your post. I have always been one to believe that if you do it well and with integrity good things will follow. This forum is important to many of us on the sidelines because your generosity, along with many others like yourself, help us realize a modicum amount of success that would have been much more difficult to attain.

Richard

[Don Miller]

If it were that simple, you'd expect that the highest prices paid for painting would have increased at the same rate as the highest prices paid for photographs. And I don't believe this is the case at all.

I do believe you would find that the yearly expenditure for art and art-like decorative objects is at a high.

But I don't believe it's simple at all. Just that there's a huge market between a lady wanting a green painting to match her sofa, and a true art collector. A true art collector would like the artist to be dead or dying. Defining those guys as the ideal buyer is making ones life difficult.

It's odd to read how artists who make unique single pieces have it easy. Who are these people? They think artists who can make multiple copies have it easy.

In fact, where are the easy businesses? I don't know any. Work for someone, or make things that people want and market it well.

No one is going to explain, especially on the internet, how they have created their profitable niche.

[sog1927]

Purely from a marketing perspective, I think the following may be part of your problem:

First, a bit of background information. I have 30+ years of images that I drew upon to print and offer for sale. I made a deliberate decision to offer a variety of styles and formats and so I had both colour and B&W images (all silver gelatin), traditional landscapes and abstracts, large format, 35mm and Polaroid SX70 images, 8x10 up to 11x14, matted as well as both matted and framed prints, along with (for good measure) greeting cards. I even scrounged up some old concert photos (CSNY, Billy Joel) from the 1970's. In other words, I tried to cover the waterfront in terms of variety. This was done in an effort to appeal to the widest possible audience.

I priced my product as cheaply as I dared: from $4 for a blank greeting card up to $140 for a framed and matted 11X14 B&W print. Some of you will say that I was giving it away.

Just speaking as someone who specifically looks for interesting and well-done photographs when I wander through art fairs (and therefore *probably* the kind of person you really want to pull into your booth), I'd like to offer my two cents' worth:

Perhaps you should select a narrower, more distinctive range of work - something that differentiates you from all the other booths? I realize you wanted to attract as wide an audience as possible, but maybe this isn't a successful marketing strategy. After all, you're really looking for someone who will part with money for an example of your work. Instead of a confusing array of radically different images, why not just have a few examples of high quality, with a coherent theme? You can change the theme for each fair, of course, and thereby cover all your stylistic bases over time. You might want to put up some descriptions of process - particularly for your LF, silver gelatin work. Having the
view camera there as a marketing hook (as others have suggested) is not a bad idea, either. Let the kids look through it. Be prepared to explain why everything is backwards and upside-down.

From the point of view of a potential customer, I think taking credit cards is probably a good idea (although the expense may make it not worthwhile). Most people don't carry much cash these days, and a lot of them don't carry checkbooks anymore, either.

Do you have a website? Printing up some flyers with image thumbnails, pricing, and a pointer to your website might snag some folks who like your work but don't want to lug a framed 20x24 around all day.

Maybe you *should* raise your prices. Nothing contributes to the perception of value as much as an inflated price tag ;-)

Steve

[Randy H]

I may not have this quote exactly right, but the jist of it is:
"Most people miss their golden opportunity because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work"
Benjamin Franklin

[claudiocambon]

Mind you, really crappy paintings will always sell pretty well - who was it who said: "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public"?

I believe it was H.L. Mencken, and the quote may be more along the lines of the "intelligence" of the American public.