I’m back home after a cool and crazy time in Missoula last week. Hanging my show ‘Going Coastal’ went relatively smoothly, Alyssa and Melanie from RMSP were a huge help in getting the prints up on the wall and in dealing with the problems that cropped up along the way. I even got my name on the window out front. The RMSP staff are terrific and I’m looking forward to having a chance to go back later in the summer.
I’m very excited about my upcoming exhibition at the RMSP gallery that runs from May 4 – Aug 3. The opening reception is this Friday May 4 from 5pm – 8 pm. Please do stop by if you get a chance.
I wanted to print and frame the work myself at least this once, even though I know that there are people who tell me that photographers should photograph, printers print and framers frame. It was a good experience and I learned a few things along the way that I should have already known. Here are 5 of those things:
1. It took longer than I was expecting
While I thought that I had a good handle on how long the various steps in preparing, printing, framing and shipping my photographs would take I was very wrong. It’s always the same whenever you’re doing something for the first time, or come back to it after awhile, it takes a while to get into a rhythm that is efficient.
2. Stuff happens
While you can’t know what’s going to go wrong you need to anticipate that something will go wrong and plan and prep before hand to allow you to be able to deal with whatever happens. For me, I ran out of ink while printing the prictures but i was ready for that and had new ink on hand, getting the glass took a little longer than I had expected, and then I broke one of the large pieces of glass. That I hadn’t expected but was lucky in that I had a spare piece on hand from an early framing effort.
3. I enjoyed the process of framing my prints
While the novelty would surely wear off if I were framing dozens of prints a day, I really did enjoy the process of framing my prints. Not sure whether the purists would consider it really framing, in that I bought the glass from a local glazier and the assembled wooded frames and matt-board and then just assembled the sandwich. I enjoyed the process and could see myself doing more of this in time.
4. I like big prints
Until this exhibition the largest I’d printed my images was about 10 x 16. 24 x 36 by comparison seems gigantic and comes with a whole set on handling issues that I wasn’t ready for. For instance, I ended up doing all the framing work on our dining table because I didn’t have another flat surface, other than the floor, that was large enough to deal with both the print and the frame. 44 x 66 would be completely out of the question. It also made me think hard about image quality. When you are up close to your image at that size you see all the imperfections. Even if I don’t print every image at this size in the future, knowing that I might will make me step up my game and look for ways to maximize image quality.
5. The product of the work is the print
While I had always considered that the print was the destination, seeing this project through to a completed set of prints under-scored that thinking. I will certainly make more of an effort than I have in the past to work up images regularly to framed prints, even if it’s only one a month.
I was interviewed for the RMSP blog recently to discuss a little about my experience with their Exhibition Mentorship program. Check out the interview here.
It’s been crunch time here over the last week as we get into the last two weeks before the opening of the exhibition at the RMSP gallery. While a more sensible person would have outsourced the printing and framing of their work for an exhibition I wanted to do all of it myself so that I would have at least had the experience of doing it at least once. As it turned out I quite enjoyed the process, although it was indeed work.
Frames and mats came from American Frame. The UPS driver that comes to our house is now used to the weird and wonderful things that he has to deliver to us and so the 6 boxes of frames were no big deal.
I went with glass rather than plexi and sourced that from a local glazier. I also ended up having to get a full ink set for the 7900. Fortunately EP Levine is not too far away and all too easy to visit.
I had done a reasonable amount of printing on the 7900 with cut sheets but this was the first time that I had used roll paper in a serious way. For this exhibition I used Breathing Color’s Optica One that I stock piled when it was on sale earlier in the year. It’s a heavier paper and has a more neutral color than Epson Ultrasmooth that I had favored up to this point.
I don’t have a big layout table where I do the printing and so ended up co-opting the dining table for the framing work.
I was quite pleased with how the framed prints came out. I’m looking forward to having a couple of these on the walls here.
I used the same packaging that the frames came in to ship the framed images off to RMSP, although I did use blue painters tape to help reinforce the glass and hopefully hold the pieces together if it breaks. I don’t even want to think about that!
I’ll be posting more about the exhibition in the coming weeks. If you’re going to be in Missoula over the summer please do stop by and check out the exhibit. I’d be interested in your feedback.
It’s been a big few days for sport here in Boston. Friday was the first home game for the Red Sox and today is the Boston Marathon.
Fitting then that I had a conversation at the end of last week about the sport of photo competitions. If we ignore all the flat out bad things about photo competitions – that they are money earners for the organizations that are running them (not strictly bad) and attempt to get royalty free images – are they useful?
You could argue that competitions give you an opportunity to judge your work against that of others and also that this is also an effective way to market your work and build an audience. I would say no on all points. Art is subjective, ask three people and you’ll get three different answers. Competitions can be an effective way to get your work out to a broad audience, that is, if you win. Otherwise there’s probably not a lot of value in it.
It’s always nice to win, for some this is more important than it is for others,
Competitions bring out the worst in me. In a competitive situation I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win. I don’t think that this is terribly useful when it comes to fine art photography where the goal, or at least my goal, is to effectively capture my emotional response to the scene in front of me or to make the image that’s in my head. As soon as I start thinking about what it takes to make a successful image before I’ve made it then I’m not going to be true to myself.
I don’t view fine art photography as a competitive sport. For me it’s much better to use your own work to benchmark against, a little like the runner who is interested in personal best time, but to do that after the fact. After you’ve made the image and worked it up. Then see how it fits with the rest of what you’ve done and whether this meets the standard you’ve set for yourself.
Competitions aren’t an end game for me. I may enter the occasional competition but it will be will photographs that I made for myself not with the competition in mind. What’s your position on competitions?
Competitions bring out the worst in me. In a competitive situation I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win. I don’t think that this is terribly useful when it comes to fine art photography where the goal, or at least my goal, is to effectively capture my emotional response to the scene in front of me or to make the image that’s in my head. As soon as I start thinking about what it takes to make a successful image before I’ve made it then I’m not going to be true to myself.
As I gear up for the exhibition at the RMSP gallery, whether to limit the edition size of the prints displayed and how to appropriately price them has been something I’ve been giving some thought to.
Let’s start with limited editions. I struggle to understand the physical reason to limit editions of photographs. When prints were made from an object, such as a metal plate or a wood block or a potato then that object would wear and as such the quality of the print would degrade. In that case limiting the number of prints to the number of good prints that could be made makes sense. For a photograph and particularly a digital photograph this argument doesn’t hold water and so the reason to limit an edition is to help control the price. Buy now before they’re gone for ever! Buy one of the first 10 before the price steps up. That kind of thing. I have little experience with this kind of motivation to buy from a sellers perspective, as a buyer it doesn’t interest me. If what I’m buying is reasonably priced then I’ll buy it, otherwise I won’t. Limiting the edition doesn’t impact that choice for me. Brooks Jensen has an excellent piece on what size an edition should be. You can find the pdf of that here.
It seems common practice even amongst early career fine art photographers to both edition work and also to charge what one could argue are significant prices for their work. I’m not against making a living from photography, far from it but I do wonder whether the price prohibits any work getting sold at all. For instance are you more likely to sell 10 prints priced at $25 or one at $250? Perhaps when you have an established customer base that you know will support your pricing it makes sense but until then what to do? I’m not much of a salesman and as such what is important to me is not wringing every last dollar out of the transaction but making people feel like they got something that was worth at least the dollar amount that the paid.
The actual price should be dictated in part by your fixed costs – this will be different for everyone, but if you’re having someone do the printing for you then you ought to at least cover that cost, if you’re printing yourself then the base price will be fixed by the materials, paper, ink etc., your time and any other overhead – the cost of keeping the lights on and the printer running. How much beyond these costs you want to go is largely dictated by how much do you want to make and how much do you think the market will pay. I think that the answer is that there’s not one answer but to have something that will work for people with a variety of budgets from $20 to $1000 and more.
The scheme that I’m circling around has, I hope, something for everything. Paper sizes from 8×10 to 24×36 with options for print only, ready to frame and framed. The pricing scheme that I have in mind at the moment would give me a range of ~$20 to ~$1500. As I said above I don’t see a reason to limit editions and so for now I don’t plan to limit my prints.
So what do you think – reasonable or crazy? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Sally Mann has used a large format camera to photograph the deep south since the 1970’s producing bodies of work that cover portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. Perhaps her most well known work was ‘Immediate Family’ which focused on her three children who were all under 12 at the time. It’s release was met with controversy, including accusations of child pornography – many of the photos were of her children playing and swimming naked at the families summer cottage.
Sally Mann has received many awards including being named ‘America’s Best Photographer’ by Time Magazine in 2001, she’s a Guggenheim fellow and three times a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship awardee.
Check out the 2006 documentary of Sally Mann, her work and her process ‘What Remains’ below.
I find that I can learn as much from looking at books from other visual artists as I do from photographers. One such example is ‘Landscape Meditations’ by Elizabeth Mowry, that I found recently while browsing in a local bookstore. From the introduction I knew this was a book I would gain something from when I read:
‘when one uses an idea already expressed by others, it becomes unequivocally necessary to take the idea deeper, further or in a different direction to avoid finding oneself on an inevitably dead-ended plateau with unfulfilling work that echoes refrains from someone else’s songs.’
This and other ideas in the book are very much in line with my thoughts for what I’m trying to do with my photography, to have my personality come through in my work. How to get there is a struggle that involves working hard and intentionally. I feel as though Landscape Meditations provides some framework for the exploration for those things that catch our attention, the themes that run deep in our work.
The book begins with a brief historical survey of those artists that have worked in series before launching into the 10 chapters that form the bulk of the book. The general format for each chapter is an introduction, the work and finally a section titled ‘Thoughts: artist to artist’. I found myself reading the ‘Thoughts’ sections for all the chapters first and then going back and reading the chapter through.
Thoroughly enjoyed the book and is one that I’ll keep coming back to.
For a number of reasons I’ve been relatively house bound for the last couple of weeks. Finally last weekend I took some of the flowers that had been sent to the house. I don’t normally gravitate towards photographing flowers but I was getting slightly stir crazy. While our house is relatively dark, the garage gets a really nice light in the afternoon. So I took the flowers out into the garage, set up the camera and flowers in the entrance of the garage and spent a happy hour photographing the flower arrangement. Of the many images I captured this was the one that I like the most. As usual, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.
As you can probably tell from the photo above, my book collection is getting a little out of control. While I would have a hard time paring it down and parting with any of the books I thought that it would be a fun exercise to select 25 ‘how-to’ books to hang on to. I decided to select a set of ‘how-to’ style of books. Some a very practical nuts and bolts of how to use Lightroom or Photoshop, some point the way ‘how-to’ using examples from the authors, some feature exercises designed to help you find your way of capturing images, some ask more questions than they answer and finally some help with talking about your work and sharing it with the world. These are all books that I still find useful, although not necessarily ones that I would recommend to someone who’s just picked up a camera. I’m sure this would be different to your list and would be happy to hear what you would have included. A ‘top ten’ from my collection of art books, monographs etc. in the coming weeks.
Scott Kelby’s 7-Point Sytem for Photoshop CS3
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Martin Evening
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Scott Kelby
Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers- Martin Evening
Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop
Adobe Photoshop Masterclass: John Paul Caponigro
Welcome to Oz
The Photoshop Darkroom
George DeWolfe’s Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop
B&W Printing: Creating the Digital Master Print
The Photographer’s Eye
The Photographer’s Vision
The Photographer’s Mind
Visual Poetry
Photographing Childhood
Within the Frame
Visionmongers
The Moment it Clicks
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs
Landscape Within
Landscape Beyond
Finding the Picture
Criticizing Photographs
Why Photographs Work
Publish Your Photography Book
