Has digital photography and the ease w/which images can be generated, changed how fine art prints are priced?
September 22nd, 2008
photochick asked:
For example while in Grad School stage of my “career” I could reasonably charge $750 for a 16×20 color photograph printed in the darkroom. Now, with digital, I haven’t got a clue.
For example while in Grad School stage of my “career” I could reasonably charge $750 for a 16×20 color photograph printed in the darkroom. Now, with digital, I haven’t got a clue.
I would say that the price should reflect the amount of work and effort put into the work. so yes, prices should be relatively low for a straight shoot and print, but if you do a lot of editing on a computer with..say photoshop, and you put in a lot more time and effort to get it just right then it stands to reason that it should be more expensive.
A couple things will determine the value of a product:
1. Location. In areas where there is a higher cost of living, you will find inflated prices for everything from groceries to photographs.
2. Demand. If you are in a location where you are competing with 20 other photographers, your prices will be in a competitive price bracket with them. If you charge too much, you’ll get no clients. If you charge too little, you’ll go out of business.
3. Experience. The more experience I get, the more I charge my clients. Every year as I get more merits, I’ll increase the procing of my products anywhere from 50 - 75% depending on how many merits I have aquired.
4. Raw Costs. If it costs you $45 to produce a product, I’ll charge someone $65 to cover repairs, upgrades and to provide a slight profit.
5. Time. Whether you charge an hourly rate or not. You want to be compensated for that time. I’m not going to charge someone X amount of dollars for 2 hours of work and then turn around and charge the same amount for 8 hours of work.
These will always be a factor in any industry. All technology does is increase or decrease the factors in any given situation above. All situations need to be acounted for when pricing a product. If I’ve recieved 20 merits over the course of a year and I could justifiably increase my pricing by 150%. However, if that puts me way above competitors, it won’t work. In the same time, if I can now produce a selective colorized print in Photoshop without having to manually paint a print. I’ve decreased my turn around time and I have also cut the costs for mainting a set of paints and in turn.
So - it’s not the technology alone that determines the pricing of a print, as you can see from above
In the black and white print arena, digital images are treated as if they are carriers of the plague.
It is all in the process .. compose, expose, process, print, mount and frame. All done with arrival methods and done by the artist.
Color wise, Cibachromes (Ilfochromes now) and dye-transfers were acceptable back in the day, but unless the artist had their hand in the whole process the value was diminished, no matter how appealing the image was/is.