From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 03/09/02-03:25:18 AM Z
FDanB@aol.com wrote:
>
>
> Will those of us who wet-print become more like painters who make one (or
> several) "originals" and then rely on machine produced prints to sell at
> a competitive price?
Like Thomas Kinkade, you mean? :^)
I can only report what I see out here in the hinterlands, which is that
there is definitely a market for handmade prints, but exhibitions of
digital prints in the galleries I frequent don't produce sales. And
from my own experience, the people who collect my prints buy them not
only for the images but because they fall in love with the process.
Given the conversations I've had with collectors of my work that I've
met, I have a hard time believing that they would be satisfied with a
digital reproduction of the gum print, even if it was substantially
cheaper and even if I was willing to produce such a thing, which I'm
not. They really love the whole idea of the handcrafted print as much as
I do. If anything, I see the demand for handmade prints rising rather
than diminishing as handmade photography becomes more rare.
I am an occasional buyer of photographs, and I can't imagine buying a
digital print. I think Lenswork has the right idea, to price them like
posters, and it would be interesting to see how well they are selling at
those prices. But even though I love some of those photographers and
their images, if I wanted to own reproductions of them, I'd be more
likely to buy the monograph than one of the digital prints.
I'd be willing to bet that I may be the earliest producer of digital
prints on this list. I was making digitally-manipulated dye-sub prints
of my photographs a decade ago. They were novel and "beautiful" and
they got me some work running around to photo shops teaching workshops
on how to make them, back in the days when Photoshop was used only by
pre-press workers, not by photographers. I did show these prints a
couple of times, but no one ever bought any, for which I'm eternally
grateful, (whereas I have sold scores upon scores of original gum prints
over the years) and I've since destroyed all the prints and the computer
files that generated them. The whole thing palled for me in a very short
time; the process started feeling sterile, mechanical, unsatisfying
and.....digital, and the prints quickly lost their transient,
superficial interest and felt sterile, mechanical and unsatisfying as
art objects. Which brings me to my final point, which is that we can say
whatever we want about the skills required to produce a digital print or
the wonderful tonality or whatever, our opinions one way or the other
won't decide the question of the value of digital prints; this value
will be placed by buyers/collectors of photographic prints. I could be
wrong, but I don't think that buyers of prints will ever value the
digital print as an art object in the same way that they value handmade
prints.
My 2cents
Katharine Thayer
P.S. I liked very much what Alejandro said on this topic; also Dick's
remark about photography as a 19th century medium resonates for me.
>
> Though I'll be the first to admit--and in all modesty I do feel I know of
> what I speak--that it takes a entirely different and demanding set of
> skills to produce excellent digital output (digitally applied archival
> pigment prints on fine cotton paper), it is simply MORE difficult and
> time consuming to make a wonderful platinum or other hand-coated print.
>
> Some dealers think there will be separate markets for handmade prints vs.
> digitally output prints. I have no idea how that concept shakes down in
> terms of respect, demand or dollars.
>
> What do those on the list think?
>
> Dan
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