Editioning

[Pieter]

I have a question for those of you who make editions of your prints. Do you print the entire edition at once. or just one or a few at a time? I guess it might depend on the number of prints in the edition and the complexity of the printing process. For an edition of 5 or 10 prints, it might make sense to make them all at once while the darkroom techniques used are still fresh in your mind (despite notes, I don't describe all the minutiae that might got into making some prints).

[Doremus Scudder]

I don't do limited editions, but I do number my prints. I reserve the first few for "artist's proofs" and start my numbering after that. Each print of a size run gets numbered in sequence. In the rare event that one of my images would sell 100 copies, I don't want to get stuck having limited it to 10 or 25 early on. Besides, limiting editions of photographs is just artificial. Quality doesn't degrade with more prints, as it does with lithography prints (where numbering editions originated and where it makes sense).

My "editions" are limited by the time I've got left to print.

Best,

Doremus

[Drew Wiley]

I think that's just an old hat marketing game, and tend to distrust galleries that rely on it. It made sense back in the days of true lithographs or even when color dye-transfer printing was routine, but not today when things can be so easily mass-produced, or at the opposite end of the scale, involve just so much care and hand-work to begin with, that they're inherently self-limiting. I personally don't even like printing more than a few of any one given image. I usually settle on only two or three, with the very best example held in reserve as a reference print. I don't even like printing or toning the same neg exactly the same twice in a row. I think I once made and sold six of the same color image in the same print size. I already have stacks of both color and black and white originals awaiting printing. Just me; but having been around a lot of galleries too, I tend to get suspicious of certain marketing tricks. It is different in tourist galleries or popular content venues; but I've never wanted to be part of that. I'm more interested in quality than quantity. Life is too short to be my own xerox machine. My two cents worth.

Logistically, when I do go back and reprint something older, its probable the available paper choices will have already changed, so therefore the specific look itself will be somewhat different. That's fine with me. And now, even as I'm sorting out duplicate prints relative to which constitutes the master set, at premium pricing, versus a set intended for sale, I don't claim prints from the same original will be exactly the same. They might be equally good; but that doesn't need to happen in a monotonous way. They might even be made decades apart on different papers altogether. But if you expect everything in a given "edition" to be as similar as possible, you'd have to print them all around the same time with the same paper, chemistry, and exact methodology. And that's not a straightjacket I'm personally willing to accept. If I think it can be printed better or in a more interesting manner later on, that's what I'll do.

[Pieter]

Editioning makes sense if you have gallery representation. I personally don't care to make more than 5-10 prints of any given image anyway. I will have moved on. On the other hand, if your prints sell for good money, why limit your income? I once heard a story about Brett Weston being asked what he was printing in the darkroom. He was printing his Holland Canal image and he replied, I'm printing money.

[Drew Wiley]

No gallery I ever dealt with gave a damn about the topic, and they had the pick of the litter, not just upstarts like me back then. But it does seem to make sense for certain especially well-known photographers who farm out their printing to someone else for sake of limited edition PORTFOLIOS per se, like a few individuals currently are, using one of the few remaining dye transfer printing houses for a sake of a last hurrah and serious collector opportunity. After all, with respect to color imagery, many of their vintage Ektacolor RC prints have already literally faded away.

[Tin Can]

Good one! Good lesson


Editioning makes sense if you have gallery representation. I personally don't care to make more than 5-10 prints of any given image anyway. I will have moved on. On the other hand, if your prints sell for good money, why limit your income? I once heard a story about Brett Weston being asked what he was printing in the darkroom. He was printing his Holland Canal image and he replied, I'm printing money.

[Pieter]

I believe Diane Arbus printed her famous box of ten photos a few at a time. She had only printed ten sets at the time of her death, and only sold four out of a planned edition of fifty. Richard Avedon bought two, the other two were bought by Jasper Johns and Bea Feitler (her set actually had eleven prints).

[Tin Can]

I have several sets of fine art silkscreen photo sensitive emulsion, deckle edged hand torn fancy paper

Numbered et al

Just touched them, never sold nor given away and shown once

I just bought 1 ply chrome watercolor paper 25 big sheets to hand tear for Salt and Albumen Prints

So it goes

[Drew Wiley]

Brett also stated that Holland Canal was his "Moonrise", and that he was sick of it, having printed it so many times. But I'll never get sick of looking at, even in repro fashion.

[Willie]

Some years ago David Vestal wrote an article on this topic. Seems that those who do individual prints in "unlimited number" seldom print more than 5 copies of any particular negative. Fewer than the "Limited Edition" series done by many.

If one is making prints by hand it is much different than doing so with digital printers. Hand coating papers, hand printing in the darkroom, carbon prints - all are much more closely aligned with the artist and it is nearly impossible to get two that are exactly the same. In ways this makes them even more valuable. No run of 10 to 500 at the push of a button.

As Drew says, materials change and over time "The LOOK" may have to as well when newer material comes out and older is no longer available. Warm tone papers for darkroom now are very different from decades ago. Our choices in most darkroom papers commercially available are nowhere near what the used to be. Some newer materials may be technically "better" but that is not what most are after when they print their work. At least no after they have matured in their craft and art.

[Michael R]

Editioning makes sense if you have gallery representation. I personally don't care to make more than 5-10 prints of any given image anyway. I will have moved on. On the other hand, if your prints sell for good money, why limit your income? I once heard a story about Brett Weston being asked what he was printing in the darkroom. He was printing his Holland Canal image and he replied, I'm printing money.

AA did an edition of 1000 of Fern Spring. :)

[Drew Wiley]

Did AA formally "number edition" any image? Or ever actually print a thousand of anything? He claimed the most he actually did was around 360 of "Moonrise". And I'm pretty sure no unsold extras of those are rotting somewhere in an attic. His trust might number official press reproductions, which tend to be very well done. Carleton Watkins ended up in the insane asylum after nearly all his most prized prints burnt up during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I would end up in the asylum if I even had to print a hundred of any single image. But some might have their own "Fermented Spring" way of dealing with that kind of monotony.

[Pieter]

Some years ago David Vestal wrote an article on this topic. Seems that those who do individual prints in "unlimited number" seldom print more than 5 copies of any particular negative. Fewer than the "Limited Edition" series done by many.

If one is making prints by hand it is much different than doing so with digital printers. Hand coating papers, hand printing in the darkroom, carbon prints - all are much more closely aligned with the artist and it is nearly impossible to get two that are exactly the same. In ways this makes them even more valuable. No run of 10 to 500 at the push of a button.

As Drew says, materials change and over time "The LOOK" may have to as well when newer material comes out and older is no longer available. Warm tone papers for darkroom now are very different from decades ago. Our choices in most darkroom papers commercially available are nowhere near what the used to be. Some newer materials may be technically "better" but that is not what most are after when they print their work. At least no after they have matured in their craft and art.

I have been printing on Ilford Multigrade FB Classic glossy for years now and that's what I like. My hope is unless Ilford goes under, they will still make that one.

[Michael R]

I don’t know if there were numbered editions of other individual images (the portfolios were obviously numbered) but I know with certainty about the Fern Spring edition of 1000 prints which he did himself (of course this was the end of the 1970s by which time he had assistants in the darkroom manning the trays etc.).


Did AA formally "number edition" any image? Or ever actually print a thousand of anything? He claimed the most he actually did was around 360 of "Moonrise". And I'm pretty sure no unsold extras of those are rotting somewhere in an attic. His trust might number official press reproductions, which tend to be very well done. Carleton Watkins ended up in the insane asylum after nearly all his most prized prints burnt up during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I would end up in the asylum if I even had to print a hundred of any single image. But some might have their own "Fermented Spring" way of dealing with that kind of monotony.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, assistant-made prints don't really count. Thousands of those were made of of his most popular images from the original negs. Alan Ross is still doing that. Best Studio (now Ansel Adam's Gallery in Yosemite Valley) sold portfolios of 10 of those for $40 back when I was a youngster (only $4 per print). They're still not worth much, at least in comparison with prints he made himself. How much he was still physically able to do in his 70's, I can't say, or whether or not your referenced Fern Sprint edition was somehow in a gray zone in that respect. Someone else would have to chime in. Moot point anyway.

[Michael R]

No, the Fern Spring edition was printed by him and is the real McCoy. What I mean by assistants is that by the late 70s he had so many print orders to fill that he had an assistant with him in the darkroom pretty much all the time taking care of the more “assembly line” parts of the process. This was the case at that time whether he was printing Fern Spring, Monolith, Moonrise etc. Of course the assistants also did other things.

Last I remember (going back maybe ten years or so) prints from this Fern Spring edition consigned to galleries would retail for about $5,000.


Well, assistant-made prints don't really count. Thousands of those were made of of his most popular images from the original negs. Alan Ross is still doing that. Best Studio (now Ansel Adam's Gallery in Yosemite Valley) sold portfolios of 10 of those for $40 back when I was a youngster (only $4 per print). They're still not worth much, at least in comparison with prints he made himself. How much he was still physically able to do in his 70's, I can't say, or whether or not your referenced Fern Sprint edition was somehow in a gray zone in that respect. Someone else would have to chime in. Moot point anyway.

[Drew Wiley]

His "mural prints" were also mostly physically printed by others; in that case, by an appropriately equipped commercial lab, yet under his immediate input or supervision. Otherwise, his health would have been winding down by the late 70's. He had been a heavy smoker and drinker most of his life - not a good recipe for old age health. But I never heard anyone giving a damn about some alleged edition number on his own prints. Sometimes just the opposite. For example, they'll pay a premium for an especially early version of Moonrise just because it looks different from all the later ones which better reflected his own expectations from that negative.

[Salmo22]

Not than long ago, I was at the Etheron Gallery in Tucson and listened to a conversation between Terry Etherton and a collector regarding one of Mark Klett's "Saguaro" prints. Editioning was never discussed. But they spent some quality time discussing the fact that Klett made this particular image using Kodabromide paper.

[Paul Ron]

editions only count if you destroy the negative at the end of the run and certify it will never be printed again.

[Tin Can]

Agree!


editions only count if you destroy the negative at the end of the run and certify it will never be printed again.

[Pieter]

editions only count if you destroy the negative at the end of the run and certify it will never be printed again.

Really difficult to prove and enforce.

[Drew Wiley]

I haven't spoken with Mark K. in a long time. He was making his living as an architectural photographer; printmaking was a sideline. But he gravitated to that understated image rendering which certain now long extinct Kodak papers provided. But even though I have favorite papers myself, I am always hedging my bets and exploring new papers as well, because as long as I can remember, films and papers inevitably keep changing. Where this whole "edition" talk starts sliding down a slippery slope is when one edition is made in medium A, then another "limited edition" comes out later on medium B, or slightly in different size, and so forth. That's especially a temptation with these new digital printing options. Well before that, it got so bad in the "lithograph" market that strictly-defined laws had to be put in place in several states (NY, CA, etc), making it illegal to call a photolithographic reproduction an actual lithograph. One type is basically just a fancy offset-printed poster, the other requires some kind of handmade plate. Then there was the infamous trick of Kincaid putting one or two tiny spots of real paint on his own assembly-line glorified posters with his own hand in order to call them original paintings. And things got so bad in one "gallery-row" town in this area that there was once an FBI agent assigned there full time just uncovering all the art fraud - another reason why the expression, "limited edition", became a flat tire.

[Pieter]

Unfortunately, there are ways for the unscrupulous to bend or break the rules. A photographer could make 2 negatives of the same scene and sell the prints as separate editions. Or alter the cropping, I guess, for a subsequent edition. But in the art world, this one takes the cake: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/arts/paint-and-switch-did-alec-baldwin-pay-190000-for-the-wrong-picture.html

[Tin Can]

all the time

many movies about it

https://www.google.com/search?q=movie+about+fake+apintings&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS850US850&oq=movie+about+fake+apintings&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i13.14063j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[Drew Wiley]

Sometimes it really does help if one simply doesn't have enough money to go around recklessly spending it! And there are times I have difficulty feeling sorry for the conspicuous consumption crowd when they do get burned.

[interneg]

to call a photolithographic reproduction an actual lithograph. One type is basically just a fancy offset-printed poster, the other requires some kind of handmade plate.

Unless it's printed off a stone with the edition limitations that incurs, the litho plates used for most photolitho on manual presses today are essentially identical to those used for regular offset litho - there are edition limits, but they're vast (think 6 figures). As 'editioning' relates purely to wearing out the master plate in litho or etching (40-50 pulls at best, unless steel-facing was used - which can be done temporarily - I think that's what was done with Strand's Mexican Portfolio both when initially printed & when reprinted), it's rather antithetical to the whole idea of the 'archival' negative - though I recall reading about a few alt-process folk finding that their neg densities had changed somewhat after 50-60 trips through a plate burner. For all that there are many reasons to critique Ansel Adams, his 'negative as score/ print as performance' is probably the smartest commentary about how to proceed - the problem is the often excessive preciousness (culturally conditioned, I'd argue) about the photographer having to be the sole printer of their own work - with editions being limited & negs destroyed afterwards- because it speaks to a terrible insecurity on the photographer's part that their performatively painfully wrought print might be equally well printed (or better printed) in less time by someone else.

[Pieter]

all the time

many movies about it

https://www.google.com/search?q=movie+about+fake+apintings&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS850US850&oq=movie+about+fake+apintings&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i13.14063j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

But we're not talking fakes, just fakers.

[Drew Wiley]

Interneg, I would NEVER want someone else printing my negs. I realize that there have been quite a few highly talented photographers who for various reasons have farmed their originals out to skilled printing services, especially with respect to color imagery. That's their prerogative. Several photo lab owners were among my longtime friends. And interesting old negatives have been discovered in attics and so forth, inviting someone to print them. I've done some of that kind of printing myself. But my attitude toward my personal work has zero to do with "insecurity". As far as I'm concerned, if my negatives or chromes do happens to be the "score", and the print the "performance", well, then, I'm the conductor, the band, and all the instruments too. That's how its supposed to be. That makes it "my" print. My pictures; my rules. Other people are welcome to make up their own rules, or even have the decisions made for them. But I wouldn't even like the idea of someone else trimming and mounting my prints, because even that is integral to composition. Of course, if someone in the printing industry was making a book for me, my own prints, my own preferred rendition of the image, and how I specifically crop my own actual prints - would all serve as a very specific reference.

But I do often roll my eyes at that performance/score analogy of AA, who did indeed have a music background. And if he had written a musical score instead of film version, how would he feel about the local Junior High Tuba and Kazoo Marching Band performing it? - "We are not amused", as he himself sometimes quoted Queen Victoria.

As far as lithographs go, there are highly respected locals guilds doing that, as well as very conscientious dealers. And as I already noted, there are also real laws in place penalizing any abuse of that category of technique. But there's still plenty of fraudulent marketing going on in tourist venues too - posters printed in the tens of thousands, which galleries paid $15 apiece for, and worth less than the frames they are put in, sold to gullible "investors" for thousands of dollars apiece. A long as naive buyers exist, art crooks will also still exist, a kind of inevitable food chain, I suppose.

[Pieter]

My pictures; my rules.

I saw an interesting interview with Neil Selkirk who made Diane Arbus' posthumous prints. It took him a while to figure out her methods--not straightforward at all.

[Drew Wiley]

I saw that interview too. It's quite a delicate dance finding someone else who understands your own vision. I tend to refer to them as "hired guns" rather than ordinary labs services. There aren't many of them, and they charge accordingly.

[Willie]

Thomas Kinkade, who once did a "limited edition" print run of 34,000. Even hit a finger with a needle to get a drop of blood for the ink he used to sign the prints so they "would have his DNA" on each one.

https://thomaskinkade.com/education/limited-edition/

Then there is this: "Bev Doolittle’s most recent print, Music in the Wind, has an S/N edition size of 43,500; however, this is the only print she published during the 1997 year."

Even if that's the only one she published all year, she would have to sign more than 119 a day just to get them all done in one year.

Marketing... it is all marketing.

[Tin Can]

Judging Art and Artiste honestly

Authentic

Avant Garde

Money changers

Modern...

who invented art

sing for your supper

birds

work their art real hard

Dancing with the Birds is a wonderful movie

https://youtu.be/Eg0iSIHIK34

[John Layton]

I have an acquaintance who creates editions of one...at which point his many collectors fall over themselves to purchase it. Brilliant! Especially as he now does this digitally, and typically will photograph many iterations of a single subject during one (still life) session. Subject might be a dried up leaf, which he will photograph in many different orientations...each one being unique to the others - and each being printed as an edition of one. Or sometimes the (still life) subjects will vary, but he will photograph many of these during a single session. Of course...having more than one collector is what makes this (marketing/sales) process work. It also helps that this particular photographers prints are absolutely stunning.

I've had a small number of collectors of my work over the years...some of whom have either passed on, others who'd only collected certain types of images which I no longer create, as I've moved on and generally won't keep repeating work just to keep collectors "happy." ("hey...got any more pictures of hermits? What...you don't do hermits anymore? See ya later!").

A "good" collector is one who will stay with an artist for a number of years...because they value that artist for the entire "arc" of evolution of their work. I currently have but one collector, who's been with me for awhile because he simply likes my work, and who could care less about editioning!