What Price Your Soul?

How do you decide what price to sell your prints for?

Well, generally you look around at the prices charged by your peers, and you pick a figure not too dissimilar from theirs. If you decide on an aggressive pricing policy, you may decide to charge less than your competitors, so that potential collectors are more tempted to choose yours over theirs. Or you may decide to sell your prints incredibly cheap, on the Ebay-style philosophy that you can bump up the shipping costs and make your profit margin that way. Or…as I have been taught, you always, always price your product over and above your main competitors. A higher price tag means that your art is automatically worth more because it has that aura of upper-market exclusivity. If you make it expensive and glossy, and pimp it as such, then people will want it more because it’s perceived as a luxury item. If you can get someone to (positively) review your piece of art, even better, because that adds even more exclusivity to the piece.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? In fact, you all know this basic stuff already. End of post. Or maybe not, because artists are humans, not autonomous pimping machines. The problem comes when you bring personal feelings into the whole monetary marketing process.

For example, how do you choose which photographs to sell? Collectors generally only buy pieces that they love, so how do you decide which ones are the right ones? After all, you can guarantee that the images your potential client loves will be different from your choice. There are many of Rich’s photographs that I adore, and he won’t even finish because he sees flaws that I don’t. These gorgeous photographs will never see the light of day, and yet I’m sure they’d sell if he would only trust my instincts. But he’s a man of principle, and he won’t finish (let alone sell) anything that doesn’t speak to him, or that he considers less than perfect in his eyes. He is limited by his perfectionism, by his emotions for his art, and like many photographers, he has absolutely no clue as to what price to put on his work.

You make a photograph because you have seen something that is beyond price, a glimpse of something beautiful, true and perfect which can’t be put into words. So it becomes tremendously difficult put a real value on such a glimpse of the infinite, because how do you price truth? You are blinded by your subjective feelings for your art, and yet you nevertheless have to assign a cash value to it. How do you put your personal feelings aside and view your work commercially, objectively and dispassionately?

In my own personal opinion, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of you being able to view your own work objectively, so don’t even try. You could ask the advice of a trusted and experienced photographic friend with commercial experience, who will help you choose the optimum images which are more likely to be commercially viable. However if you don’t have such a person close at hand, you’ll simply have to choose those images you love, and from that shortlist, guess which ones that will sell. Bearing in mind that a photographic artist puts a small piece of his soul into each and every image, you then have to literally put a price on your soul.

For Sale on Ebay: One Selenium Toned Soul on a 16"x20" Silver Gelatin Print, Printed by Artist, a bargain at $100 plus shipping.

Being both an artist and a businessman sucks, huh?!

HoneyB 1052

HoneyB from this week's shoot. This shot has been described as "a bit too out-there" so I'm guessing it's unlikely to qualify as suitable for print sale status. But Rich loves it, so what the heck, I'm posting it anyway.

Two Worlds

My new printer has arrived. I broke the last one, an Epson R2400, through overuse. It started to make grinding noises and the prints came out stripy. So I decided that I should upgrade to an Epson Pro 4880. It a big printer, state of the art, A2, weighs 55kg! It's about the size of an old-style photocopier. I can print to canvas and on just about any paper known to man.

I'm really eager to give it a run. I've profiled my paper and the test prints match the monitor display perfectly. I've printed some images and it is awesome. The quality of the prints at A2 is breathtaking.

Its funny, but for some reason, holding an actual print of an image makes it seem much more real than looking at it on a monitor. Lin disagrees, but then, I'm the photographer so I guess it means more to me to have the print.

But, I now have the frustrating problem of selecting which images to print.

I have loads of great images that you've seen here, and some you haven't seen yet, pretty much all of them nudes. However, I can't put them on the walls! We have a constant stream of kids round and it's not appropriate to have nudes (even tasteful and relatively modest ones) on the walls with other people's children around. Our kids would not be fazed, but the others would. Plus we have several friends, some of them devout Christians, who would certainly be horrified if there were naked people on the walls (this is rural middle-class England, remember.)

So I'm printing lots of pictures of my kids, pictures that you can't see because we don't show them here as a matter of policy. At least I have lots of good studio kiddie pics! But there is only one place that I can safely hang my nude prints and that's in our bedroom, so that's where they are going at the moment. Unfortunately it means that only Lin and I can see them.

Two Worlds that can't overlap.

What would you do?
Do any of you with kids display your nude art on the walls, and if so, how do you cope with the underage or more morally-upright visitors who would object?



Here a picture of me (shock and horror), next to my really big machine, and with the first 3 framed prints from the printer. Technically you're getting 3 nudes for the price of 1, except for the reflections and small size, and of course having me in it. It was taken with the self timer on the 350D as the battery wasn't charged on the 5D.