What Makes a sellable photograph?

[Peter Lewin]

Good points John. Photo collectors, casual or serious, IME are buying a piece by the artist as well as a piece of the artist. So the backstory is important and I love that part of it. I get totally stoked talking about the why where when how history of an image and my enthusiasm can be contagious to the buyer. Maybe in that respect I am "selling", but it is totally genuine and heartfelt-not a sales pitch.

If I may, an anecdote to illustrate how enthusiasm & background can help sell a photograph. The only color print I have bought (see earlier posts about buying B&W large format works) is by a photographer named Deborah Bohren whom I met at a crafts show; the print is called "chimenees" and is the view from a Paris window. Now my wife is a teacher at a private school, and at one point she taught the niece of the Turnley twins; we both got to know the mom (the sister of the twins). So when Deborah told me the story of the picture, how she took it from the window of Peter Turnley's apartment in Paris, the sale was sealed! The back story adds to the enjoyment of the print.

[Kirk Gittings]

Frankly the "back story" for my images usually has nothing in common with your silverback gorilla, chest pounding fish stories (though I did work on one image off and on for 25 years-but logistically it was only a few feet from my car and it was a bit windy
). My backstories are usually all about the history of a landscape-IE not about the photographer as heroic but the Earth as amazing.

[Drew Wiley]

Sometimes I'd throw a teaser into the title next to the print. For example, at one time I printed a complex tangle of weeds beside the road at Wickenburg, AZ.
But I titled it, Cow at Roadside, Wickenberg... Yeah, if you peeped through all those weeds, there was a tiny cow in focus way back in the background somewhere.
People want stand in front of that print for twenty minutes at a time in the gallery looking for the cow. I had fun; they had fun.

[Michael R]

This hasn't been mentioned yet, but when it comes to certain categories of subject matter, from a tone reproduction perspective higher contrast often beats lower contrast re selling.

[mdm]

There is only one thing that makes a photograph saleable, context.

[Kirk Gittings]

Peter, my last comment above was in response to Drew's post. Not yours.

[Andrew O'Neill]

If a person makes a connection with the image (it's happened twice to me), it's easier to sell... and the price has to be right! I'm not in it for the money so I don't think about sellability (is that a word?)

[Jim Noel]

This I know personally. When I am in the field and I make a photograph that I think will sell, it rarely does. When I am in the moment and making images that personally really move me-those sell.

That is a very good answer.

[Drew Wiley]

Kirk - my own context stories are usually too long-winded for common audiences, so your approach never worked for me. I do better on the trail, explaining
geology or archaeology or natural history as the sights pass along. In a gallery, half the time I have no idea why I took a particular picture. It just worked. I do
have some Native American themes in my overall portfolio; but as you know, I go overboard in that department too. It's silly to explain why diorite rather than
common granite was used for metate stones, when what someone really was attracted to was the bright crimson wildflower petals scattered in the scene.

[C.Wetherill]

A great example of this is John Fielder's work. He produce images of nature that were very informative and he made a lot of money selling them through books and calendars. However, he was not successful at selling them as decorative art for the home because they were plain and did not inspire profound emotions.

He was just here in Montrose a few months ago, giving a lecture/talk, and selling books and photographer workshops. I agree that his photos are kindof pretty-picture-ish (banal?) and I've never found them at all memorable (he's 68). But the place was packed to overflowing and he has a lot of fans.

Because he can make very large works I think he has gotten some corporate sales - a bank in town has one. He also mentioned doing an installation recently for a famous Bronco player, a backlit transparency that covers one end of a room.

BTW - Fielder is no longer doing LF work. He said he's now using a 20 Mp digital camera of some sort. Maybe even a point-and-shoot... something about how much easier it is on his back and knees. For those unfamiliar, he became famous here in Colorado for his llama pack trips into the wilderness, to carry all his LF gear. His latest book is of B&W photos, made by cranking the color saturation all the way down to zero. He no longer has a gallery in Denver, having moved up to the Kremmling area (north of Breckenridge and I-70).