I have come across photographer’s sites where every photograph is accompanied by a price tag and a shopping cart symbol. Obviously the author of those images wants to make it very easy for a possible buyer and/or wants to give the impression that it is a commonplace thing to buy a print. This, however, is not my experience at all. I don’t have a shopping cart on my site (neither do I want to appear to be an image pedlar, it doesn’t even actually pay off…). Safe payment systems like PayPal and others make it easy to buy for (aspiring) collectors, but they seem to prefer to buy through galleries (and pay the extra amount). Being a collector myself as well as a photographer I am willing to go the extra mile if I want something. Fortunately my work is in demand with certain international museums, and you can see for yourself on my site that it does have quality. If I did not get the occasional collector visiting me too, like happened today – I might start to doubt whether any other collector reading this, after enjoying my site, would ever contact me for wanting to own some of my work. So if you do, let me know…
Somebody wants to buy one of my photographs, but only if it is from a limited edition. I tell him I don’t do limited editions, and explain that it’s not in his interest either…
The buyer says he doesn’t want to pay the price if the photograph can be reproduced in theoretically limitless numbers. I explain that it would be absolute horror to me to have to manually produce a really large number of identical first-class prints, repeating every time all the darkroom corrections and retouching afterwards (we are talking about good old gelatin silver prints, archival and all). So suppose I make an edition of say 50 to make sure I have enough stock for the future, since I can’t exceed the limit, once set. Had the buyer not insisted, chances are that I will never ever make more copies of the wanted photograph than maybe 5, if it’s not an absolute superseller! So be honest, what would you prefer if you’re looking for exclusivity?