Editioning prints

[bob carnie]

Cyrus- this topic is very close to me at this moment.

Tonight , I am presenting my work for the first time in a large show, along side my wife and two others.
Those of you in Toronto are welcome to come it is at Arta Gallery in the Distillery District.

Editioning prints has been on my mind and that of Lauras so here is what we decided on this matter.

Laura has been selling her work privately for over 25 years and never editioned any prints, just her signature went with every print. This show tonight contains 35 of her images that we scanned and made digital silver prints, trying to go back in time and figure out which images were printed , or sold before is impossible therefore we have decided with this body of work**infared landscapes** we are keeping it an open edition. She is happy with this idea as her next few years will be spent making gum over platinums of all her best imagery.

Myself- I have only ever given two prints away of the body of work I am presenting tonight so I know exactly how many prints are out there.
I have decided to do a limited edition of 3 prints of each image. I have pricing for the size I appreciate 20x24 , but as well I am willing to make smaller or larger prints depending on the purchasers requirements, but I will only ever print three. I have a simple price structure in mind and if an image sells out tonight , I will not get rich with the cash, but at least start recouping the years of work that has gone into this paticular series.

I am doing solarizations in a wet lab and the ability to match the series is not possible and I have no need to print out each image to its full series, as I see this as a complete waste of energy. So each image bought will be distinct, I can easily track the series as there are only three of each to be done, and I have so many projects on the go I do not waste a moments sleep trying think I will retire on my print sales.
There will be a different pricing on larger prints, but not a smaller version.

I am making three rather than one print, One would be rare, but what I have found after exhaustive hours of printing the images many times , I am getting better with each printing.
So I will print on demand and try to keep good records of purchases.
Who knows after tonight , if people think the work sucks , then it will be an edition of one.
Bo

[Jim Jones]

There can sometimes be other issues as well. Here in Newport, RI (and some other parts of the state) we have a tax free art zone--at least for the political moment. For photographs to be eligible as 'tax-free art' they must be in limited and not open editions.

It's not the duty of the government to define art. Doing so for tax purposes may be more excusable than the postal restrictions that limited what Edward Weston could mail to galleries. It was much worse in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany.

It would be good to have one universal system of defining editions, but this should be done by artists, not bureaucrats.

[Bruce Watson]

I have heard that AA printed very different versions of Moonrise. You can't have a high contrast and a low contrast version of the same photo in the same edition, can you?

Not a problem for Mr. Adams -- he didn't fall into the editioning trap. It's photography, not lithography.

[Noah A]

... Rather than spending time trying to [cynically ?] manipulate the demand for one's prints, one could just concentrate on creating images. If we want to sell our work then we can't afford to be naive, but equally, that doesn't mean that we are obliged to behave like hawkers.


Kind regards,

Richard

To be a successful artist, and I'm defining that as someone who earns a living with his or her work, you need to be a good business person as well as a good photographer.

A lot of expense goes into producing a photograph. Research, planning, travel expenses, film and processing costs and lots of time are involved. I have no problem with limiting my prints in order to sell them for higher prices.

On the other hand, if another photographer chooses to sell more prints at lower prices, that's fine too. It's also a valid business choice based on that photographer's work and the target market that work will appeal to.

In my opinion, someone who sells five prints to collectors for $2000 each is no more of a 'hawker' than someone who pumps out higher number of prints and sells them for $100 at craft shows.

They're different business models, but let's be honest here, they both involve selling your work.

[Scott Walker]

It would be good to have one universal system of defining editions, but this should be done by artists, not bureaucrats.

I think that would be a rather dangerous door to open. The group of artists doing the defining or compiling the community sentiment would for all intents and purposes become bureaucrats. In order to define editions universally one would have to first define and categorize artists. Where does photography even fit into the mix.

Having "bureaucrats" (artists or other) determining how art work must be documented or numbered or if it even fits into the category of things worthy of being numbered is just plain wrong.

[Robert Brummitt]

I remember Bruce Barnbaum sharing that he doesn't edition his prints. "I also had a fear that someone in one country had this number of a print while this other person had the same edition of the same print somewhere else."
To paraphrase Dr. McCoy. "I'm a photographer, Not a bookkeeper!"

[Brian Ellis]

It's either a major pain or a horrendous pain to print editions in the darkroom. It's a major pain if you do them all in the same session. But if they're all done in the same session you at least have a shot at making them very close to identical although with a lot of physical effort and boredom involved. If they're spaced out over a period of time then it's a horrendous pain, with the degree of pain increasing in proportion to the time between prints. No matter how good your notes are and how much you try to keep everything the same, I always found it very difficult to make duplicates in a darkroom when they weren't done in the same session.

When I printed in a darkroom I made three immediate copies of anything I thought had a chance of selling. Three was, unfortunately, always plenty.

Limiting the number of prints of a photograph is of course totally phony and indeed negates one of the most significant inherent qualities of photography (its reproducibility, see Roland Barthes) but that's what almost everyone does.

[paulr]

I don't think it's reasonable to use someone like Ansel as a model. When he was forming his habits, photography wasn't even widely accepted as an art medium; there were no photography departments in art museums, and none of the galleries connected to the broader art world were selling photos. Not unrelatedly, demand was low. It was unusual for anyone to sell more than two or three of any image.

Things are obviously different today. There are many different worlds or markets in which you might sell your work. Different ones have different customs.

When you decide on your own editioning (or non-editioning) policy, it's worth considering your own values and also the conventions of any market that you're interested in selling to.

When it comes to editions, my ideas are pretty much in line with the ideas of the people I try to sell to: I don't like the idea of huge numbers of multiples of my stuff out there. But I've also taken some advice. When I started making digital prints, multiples were easier, and at first I had the idea of making bigger edtitions, which I'd be comfortable selling for less. I considered editions of 40; a consultant talked me out of it. She said it was unlikely that I'd sell 40 of anything at any price (true!) and that a number that big cheapened the work. I think she was right; I've dropped the size in half.

Your ideas and your mileage may vary, but I think it's worth paying attention to the customs and predispositions of whatever corner of the world you want to deal with.

[paulr]

I'm perplexed by this idea that limited editions are somehow deceitful of phony. The idea constitutes nothing more than a promise: "this is the maximum number of these things that I'll make." The reason is overt and widely understood: to preserve value. Making unlimited quantities of a collectible object deflates value just like printing unlimited quantities of currency.

It's only phony if you break the promise.

People correctly point out that the convention started with mechanical printmaking, where it was necessary because the image on the stones and plates wore out. With a lithograph or etching, the promise of the edition is the same; there's just an added reason. You're promising to preserve not just value but image quality. Both reasons are legitemate enough.

[cyrus]

Well, it seems to me that the conflict boils down to this for me: on one had you want to have limited editions in order to comfort the collector that there aren't a million other copies of his collectible print floating around out there. On the other hand it is not reasonable to tell a photographer that once he's made an edition from a certain negative, he can never go back and reprint it, and that furthermore he has to print an entire edition in a single session. I have to come up with a reasonable compromise point between these two competing goals.

Speaking for myself, there is little liklihood that I'll ever make more than 10 prints anyway, not just because platinum is expensive but also because after 10 prints, I'm pretty much done artistically-speaking, and will probably move onto something else. So as far as the collector is concerned, he's safe in knowing that there won't be too many other prints floating out there anyway, regardless of whether I formally edition prints or not, just because I don't have a high output anyway.

Secondly, if I sequentially number the prints made, then there is a formal system in place to know how many prints there are in existence, in total. There's a record in my darkroom diary, which shows the date that each specific print was made, and all the prints are accounted for. So that's another layer of security for the collector.
And since I am not promising never to make any other prints from a negative, and I don't plan to print entire editions in a single session (yuck) then that covers my own artistic needs/wants.

So I think that's where I'll draw the line of compromise between these two competing goals. The truth is, like I said, I'm not doing this for the income generated by print sales, so it is more important for me to maintain my artistic freedom than to protect the collector's investment. I do what I can for him/her, but maintaining market value of prints is just not my primary concern. The collector is just going to have to accept the fact that I will always have the option of going back to the negative and reprinting it (which shouldn't affect the value of his print necessarily since if I go back to a negative it is probably in order to make a substantially different version of hte print anyway.)

The only thing about making limited editions that I DO like is that it forces me to have some discipline in the darkroom by meeting a quota of sellable quality prints. I have a tendency to spend hours dilly-dallying and playing around with negatives, trying all sorts of experiments, so that by the end of the printing session I may have a lot of experimental results, but not solid, sellable "final products".