Night photography of abandoned places, and neighborhood toy camera photos
You can beat the police, you can beat the road, and you can even beat the clock. But you can’t beat the desert. Nobody can. You just cannot. — Super Soul in Vanishing Point
I’ve been a big fan of Monte Hellman’s film Two-Lane Blacktop
These are a few of my favorite things (covered car with shrubs) — by Joe Reifer
Let’s break the fine art photography print pricing down into categories. All prices are for unframed prints.
Fine Art Photography Print Pricing
A: $50-100 for a small print. You are happy that somebody likes your photographs and wants to own one. You charge a token amount to cover the cost of printing. Prints are sold directly to the buyer either in person or online.
B: $250-500 for a medium sized print. You’ve moved beyond the small cafe show into small galleries. You’ve sold a little bit of work at level A. The craftsmanship of your prints is quite good. You’re now selling your prints in editions. You’ve been taking notes on marketing. Sales may be direct or through a small gallery that takes 40-50%.
C: $1500-2500 for a medium/large sized print. You’ve been discovered by someone who can help market your work. Prints are now in the 24×30″ range or bigger. You may have received some hype in a medium sized gallery, and perhaps some attention from a contest or magazine. Your prints are sold in small editions. You get about 50% of the sale price minus your expenses.
D: $4000-10,000 and up for a large print. You’re now in the major leagues. For some reason your work has tipped from level C to level D. Could be an influential gallery, museum, book, media attention, critical acclaim, hardcore marketing, social climbing, dumb luck, or a combination. Probably a combination. The few people I’ve met in this league don’t necessarily make photographs that are any better than yours or mine.
I am currently at the lower end of level B and selling very few prints because I don’t like hyping myself, and haven’t found the right person of influence to whisper my name into collectors’ ears. If you are a person of influence who has a talent for whispering, drop me a line.
To keep life simple, I produce prints of my night work in two sizes:
If you were to ask me last week what my pricing was for an unframed print, I would’ve said $150 for a regular print in an open edition, and $300 for a large print in an edition of 5.
As Walter says in the Big Lebowski (quoting Theodore Herzl), “if you will it, it is no dream.” I am jumping up from level B- to level B+. All pricing is artificial. I will embrace the artifice. Here is the new pricing:
Aspect ratios will vary for a few images shot square or on 6×7 film. This editioning may be seen as a completely artificial marketing device. Or perhaps as a realistic number of prints that can sell of one image. Or a purposefully crafted number of prints that I could care about making before my attention span runs out.
There. I just jumped up a level in the fine art photography pricing world. All I had to do was type the new pricing into my blog. Maybe one day I’ll claw my way up to level C. I am not holding my breath.
Are you trying to sell prints? Where do you fall on the scale, and how are you planning to get to the next level?
Update: After finishing this brief meditation on pricing fine art photography, I read New Republic art critic Jed Perl’s vitriolic polemic against Koons, Murakami, and the modern museum experience. A very highly recommended rant indeed (via Gallery Hopper).
The Tsui House, also known as the fish house, is located on Matthews Street in Berkeley, and was completed in 1995 at a cost of $250,000. The design was inspired by the tardigrade, a small segmented animal related to an anthropod. More details on this project can be found on the Tsui Design website. A 2007 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and recent write up in the East Bay Express provide additional information on Tsui.
The house is located in an otherwise normal looking SW Berkeley neighborhood. The image above was photographed during the June 2008 full moon around midnight, with an exposure time of approximately 6 minutes. The moon is reflected in the window at upper right. As the camera position faced to the East, the star trails from the long exposure are quite pleasant in a print. This image will be part of a night photography group show called Nocturnes…in Berkeley? that runs July 14th-August 22nd at The Lightroom.
The bunny topiary and squirrel topiary images were shot during last week’s full moon for an upcoming night photography exhibit called Nocturnes…in Berkeley? that runs from July 14th-August 22nd at The Lightroom in Berkeley.
The images were shot with a Mamiya 7II and 43mm lens using Fuji 64T slide film, and the slides were drum scanned. The resulting sharpness and resolution is extremely impressive - these prints could easily go to 4 feet on the long side. I’m not sure how big I’m going to print for the show, as mounting and framing costs are always a contraint. But wouldn’t it be cool to have a 4 foot bunny or squirrel topiary print?
In addition to shooting neighborhood plant sculptures in the middle of the night for the show, I was also asked to write an artist statement, and here’s how it goes:
Joe Reifer lives in Berkeley. He thinks talking about yourself in the third person is funny. Joe’s night work focuses on temporary, obsolete, abandoned, and derelict sites. He also enjoys shooting mundane suburban neighborhoods in the daytime with toy cameras. An apartment with stone facing, shrubberies, a jetski in the side yard – all become strange dream fodder embedded in a fuzzy snapshot.
A strange confluence of events led Joe to investigate a new hybrid of his parallel bodies of work for this show — including a running topiary joke on the TV program Little Britain, and the acquiring of a map called Hidden Gems of Berkeley. If a nicely trimmed hedge is interesting when shot on a sunny afternoon with a Holga, how does it look at night? I hope the resulting images inspire you to give the details in your neighborhood another look under the moonlight.
The new Wordpress theme I’m using has a wider left column width, so as an experiment I’ve expanded the image size to 750 pixels for this gallery. I hope you enjoy the added detail in this 3rd set images from the Mojave. If you’d rather see one of these images on your wall than on a monitor, please feel free to contact me about a print. And speaking of prints, I’ll have 3 prints in a night photography group show in Berkeley next month, and a 2 person Holga show is coming up in August. More details soon!
To celebrate the renaming and redesign of the blog, here’s the Lou and Andy smurf bit from Little Britain.
Trivia: The Lou and Andy characters have their origins in an improv video where David played Lou Reed and Matt was Andy Warhol.
Favorite quote: I look a pillock!
The second night of shooting began with high clouds blowing through for the first 1.5 hours of darkness. After a few initial shorter exposures, most images were in the 3-5 minute range to achieve a balance moonlight, depth of field, and cloud streaks. I explored a different part of the yard the second night, and used a lower, closer camera position to create a different balance between the cars and sky or mountains.
Reviewing the images from the first night on a laptop before going back was a helpful part of figuring out what kind of compositions worked best, and maximizing productivity during the 5 hours of available moonlight. I did about the same number of setups the 2nd night, but got more keepers. Let me know which ones are your favorites. A 3rd gallery with an additional 10 images will be coming up in the next few days.
Many of the images in the Mojave Desert trip diary were shot from a moving car with a point and shoot camera. The gallery narrative was inspired by Rudy Vanderlans’ excellent book Supermarket
After 400 miles of driving and daytime temperatures of 103 degrees, the night brought a waxing moon and breezy 75 degree weather with big clear skies for the first night of shooting. Flabbergasted by both the size and contents of the yard, much of my shooting leaned towards a documentary style with semi-wide focal lengths and medium range positions. With 5 hours of moonlight and exposures in the 4-6 minute range, I completed about 25 setups, 12 of which are presented above (plus the Pacer X I posted this morning).
As the moon set behind the Sierra a little after 2am, we drove back into town for some precious sleep, only to be awakened early the next morning by some kids playing an extremely enthusiastic game of marco/polo in the motel pool.
Some of the first night’s images may not translate well at 600 pixels — I’m looking forward to eventually making some prints where the subtleties can be properly enjoyed. I changed my strategy the second night by shooting closer to the cars from a lower angle, and using a bit more flashlight. Stay tuned for part II in the next few days, including such classic cars as the AMC Matador and AMC Gremlin.
