Brooks Jensen on print pricing in Lenswork

[QT Luong]

Please don't get the impression that I'm selling 9 prints per week all year. I wish I was but that wouldn't leave any time to photograph and print.

That's the one of the two problems with selling prints for a very low price (the other being to sell enough). I don't know if Jensen is touching on that in his article, but I think the reason he is able to do so profitably is that he benefits from the Lenswork infrastructure for fullfilment, as well as promotion.

[Kirk Gittings]

$20 prints? Here is my point of view as a commercial/fine art photographer. Why would I make and sell a print to someone to enjoy for 20 years, who then probably resells it at a profit (that I get nothing from) for allot less than I sell ONE TIME RIGHTS to a small local magazine for? As a commercial photographer for 30+ years, I know what my time is worth. I would rather sell allot fewer prints at a much higher price and get some real value for my efforts.

[William Mortensen]

I'd hope someone would pen a thoughtful reply to Jensen's viewpoint and send it in to LensWork. Quite often I read fairly provocative viewpoints in LensWork and other art-oriented journals, but I seldom read anything in the way of response. Jensen has surely drawn that, but I wonder whether the counterpoint will be confined to internet forums and coffee-house conversations...

[QT Luong]

Why would I make and sell a print to someone to enjoy for 20 years, who then probably resells it at a profit (that I get nothing from) for allot less than I sell ONE TIME RIGHTS to a small local magazine for?

Numbers. What is the circulation of the local magazine ? Assume that everybody who buys (or gets for free) a copy of the magazine can cut out the photo, and paste it on their wall to enjoy. Some people that I know (including an MD) actually do that even to decorate commercial spaces. By contrast, your print is sold in a single copy.
If you could sell a $20 print to only one tenth of the readership of the local magazine, would that be worth doing ?

[Alex Hawley]

"As a commercial photographer for 30+ years, I know what my time is worth. I would rather sell allot fewer prints at a much higher price and get some real value for my efforts."

Kirk, here is the difference between your view and mine. I'm not a professional photographer. I have made my living completely outside of photography for 30 years and will continue to do so. My livelyhood has never depended on it and never will. I didn't start taking photography seriously until about five years ago.

That being said, I do take this seriously. I'm not out trying to sell cheap shots to flatter my ego. I strive to develop myself to produce something of merit. How much merit it attains is dependent on my own natural ability. There have been other artists that have come from outside the professional photographer world. Henry Gilpin is as the top of my list as an example.

Bottom line right now for me is $50 prints sell, $100 prints don't.

[Kirk Gittings]

" Numbers. What is the circulation of the local magazine ? Assume that everybody who buys (or gets for free) a copy of the magazine can cut out the photo, and paste it on their wall to enjoy. Some people "That I know (including an MD) actually do that even to decorate commercial spaces. By contrast, your print is sold in a single copy. If you could sell a $20 print to only one tenth of the readership of the local magazine, would that be worth doing ?"

QT I find this illogical. How many people cut it out is not my issue. For even 50 bucks, I wouldn't give the magazine 1/4 page. My client is the magazine and he uses it once, it is off the stands, and is largely forgotten. Maybe a few people clip it out this tiny reproduction and put in their office cubby and in two years it has faded past recognition. And it is not signed. It has very limited value except as short term advertising for me to sell them real prints.

A client that buys my prints gets significant more use out of a print than the magazine did and he has the ability to resell it for perhaps a significant profit (the magazine can't). He just can't reproduce it.

Jensen gets away with this because he virtually doesn't have to pay for advertising or marketing his work. His magazine does that for the price of a little ink and paper. It is like when Steve Simmons does workshops. Do you know what a huge advantage that is to have your own magazine to advertise your efforts and give you credibility?

What would Brooks have to charge for his prints if he had to pay for his advertising? The rest of us don't have that luxury.

He is like a foreign country dumping goods below market value in the US just to gain market share.

[Kirk Gittings]

Alex my work once went for those prices also, but my goal was not to stay there and I have worked my butt off for thirty years (recently not taking a day off for 2 years and 8 months to work on my last show and book) to get a higher price for my work.

For christ's sake, I sell non-archival 8x10 commercial prints of to my architecture clients in huge volume for more money per print than Jensen is selling his art work! And I know how little real profit there is even in volume at those commercial rates.

I repeat "He is like a foreign country dumping goods below market value in the US just to gain market share."

[J.L. Kennedy]

Kirk:

First, be aware that I think you are a fine photographer and well deserving of the living that you make with your photography and self-promotion skills. That being said, who would find fault with Brooks Jensen if he sat down fifteen years ago and thought "I think I will try to create a well-respected photography periodical so that I can use it as a venue for selling my prints at a low enough price that a lot of people can purchase them and consequently I will maximize my revenue through volume rather than unit price." I doubt that that was his primary motivation but if it was, it would be perfectly valid.

By the way, I am also one of those weirdo, conservative (nearly libertarian) persons who think that anyone, foreign or domestic, who sells their product at below their cost is simply benefiting the consumers of their product in the short term, until they get tired of losing money. In fact, I wish more producers of products that I consume would do that! And I don't believe that I would suffer in the long run if they did. I think that they would eventually raise their price to a profitable level and I think that no matter how big their market share becomes there will always be someone else who would step in to produce any product that there is a demand for. I guess the bottom line is that I believe the evidence shows that free markets work to the benefit of all, and I think Brooks Jensen is doing a good job explaining how the free market applies to fine art photography.

[Kirk Gittings]

Maybe my main point is being lost. Many people seem to be seeing Brooks approach as a model for marketing photographs. The plain fact is that without free advertising his approach would go nowhere. He would be one of a zillion good photographers with a website and cheap prints. Galleries would not touch someone in that price range, because it won't pay the rent or the postage for invitations. His prices do not factor in many of the costs that most photographers or artists deal with like advertising and galleries getting half. So he is not a good model, and his arguments about other people's high prices are really unrealistic from that point of view as well.

Go ahead start a magazine so you can market your prints for less than I sell an 8x10 C print of a crappy building to an architect client.

[Michael Mutmansky]

I normally stay out of these kinds of discussions, because I don't believe there is anything to be gained by them, but there are a few issues that I think bear keeping in mind here.

I completely agree with Kirk on these issues, and moreso, I believe that Brooks is doing a disservice to the photographers out there who do sell their images by making position statements like this. I'll get to this point at the end.

He has a marketing mechanism in place to be able to sell 1000 prints at $20 a pop, and he is completely discounting the catbird seat he has in this respect. It is unrealistic to presume that others can utilize this mechanism to sell nickel and dime prints. It's also unrealistic to presume that handmade prints can and should be produced in the kinds of volume or at the speed at which would be necessary to produce any kind of sustainability at that pricing level, or even at 4x that level. And no, I'm not talking about the wishful thinking of 'digital handmade', I mean handmade, where the craft of photography still presides.

Also, Brooks is making the presumption that there is a somewhat unlimited number of potential buyers out there if only there were $20 fine art prints available. This is a terribly, terribly incorrect presumption. There are many people who sell images in this manner, and to the best of my knowledge, they do not exactly make a killing this way. To suddenly have a large number of people join in the pricing fun would oversaturate an already limited buyer's market with more options.

Fundamentally, he is advocating a race to the bottom, and I don't believe that this is good for the artists/producers at all. It cheapens the percieved worth of the work, as well as the actual value. They'll spend more time in order fufilment, and less time making images, and ultimately become a cog in the macine rather than an artist. Sort of reminds me of a few scenes from the movie Metropolis.

I believe these kinds of statements cause downward pressure on the public's perception of photography as an art or an art/craft, or whatever you would like to classify it as. When he trumpets to the world that the public should not be spending more than $20 on a print, (even though the examples he gave are laughably extreme on both ends), he is working to undermine the basic mechanisms that the artist/producer use to maintain some level of sales and sustainability.

Ultimately, his dimestore prints will not enjoy the general collector's market price pressure that many other photographers images will receive, because he is selling a Wall Mart product at a Wall Mart price. There's a reason Wall Mart and Tiffany's dont have overlapping products, and as long as he is aiming for the one crowd, I don't expect him to ever attract the interest from the other crowd in the secondary market. I'd rather show enough self-respect to sell my images at a fair price based on my time involved and also my vision. I'm not trying to make a killing on a few suckers out there, but I'm not about to cheapen my work for the notion that I may sell a few more.

I used to be a subscriber because the magazine claimed to be about 'the images'. The printing quality is the best I have seen and for the most part the artists selected are high quality photographers and I generally find the magazine satisfying. Recently, he has become so enamoured by the digital process that he has felt it necessary to sputter on about digital (as if it has anything to do with 'the images'). This last position statement indicated to me that I'm not sure that he and I are moving in the same direction much at all, and I don't believe that it is worth supporting the magazine when it advocates and intends to hurt the very photography market that many of us may be a part of in some small manner. I will let my subscription lapse.

---Michael