How much is a photograph worth?
I was speaking with the assistant manager of my local eatery this morning and she told me some very important things about photography and displaying photographs as I was asking her input about pricing these unlimited, signed 6 x 9-inch prints for the Santa Monica Mountains Visitor Center exhibition next July, and the idea is to make them affordable for folks, and I said, well, why are people willing to pay thousands for a mediocre oil painting or acrylic at a fashionable gallery, but don’t want to spend a few hundred for a great photograph, and she said, well, people take their own photos and they think it’s easy, and they don’t realize all the work that goes into bringing a photograph to market, such as editing the raw footage and getting rid of the blurred shots or the ones that just miss, all of that it very labor intensive; all of the hours that go into taking the photos, standing there, waiting for just the right moment; the photoshopping and post-production work that goes into it; then there’s the printing of the photos and the framing, not to mention signing and numbering them. So you see it’s not just that someone pressed a button on the camera and you can print this out any number of times, but what kind of effort went into all of it to get it to that point, and I would argue that maybe photography is at least as difficult than painting in that you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of photos, you have to cull that down to the best ones, etc., and maybe a painter can produce a certain type of image in a smaller amount of time than we think, but since we can’t do it, we think it would take days and days to paint a landscape. Someone once asked a writer how long it took to do a book or whatever, and he was, say 50 years old, and so he said, 50 years. It might have been Hemingway.
