Digital BW, The Print

Tony -

Let me clarify my situation a little bit.  My wife is the daughter of A. Aubrey Bodine.  He was (1906-1970) a photojournalist/feature photographer for The Baltimore Sun for 47 years.  He left behind a family collection of mostly 11x14 glossy photograph, and a large body of work of 16x20 exhibition photograph -- mostly matte -- that were exhibited all over the world in Salon competitions.  These were (mostly) camera club competitions - juried.  Bodine was accepted in over 800 Salon shows and won over 1000 awards.  His acceptance rate made him one of the top rated photographers of his day.

This was the glory age of the pictorialists.  We have 800 Salon catalogs that were printed for the shows, and they represent the finest photographers of the 1930 through 1960 time frame.  At some point we will scan them and put up a website to let other people enjoy this work.

We have scanned around 12,500 of Bodine's images and we offer them for sale on our website www.AAubreyBodine.com and through retail locations.  At one time (before the American retail economy cratered) we had more than 200 resellers carrying our reprints and note cards. (We now have about a dozen). Also, I have printed and sold over 185,000 note cards -- A7 size, i.e. 5"x7" folded, blank inside, with image on the front and title, date and description on the back.

I see the economy recovering, slowly to be sure, but recovering.  When I started this business in 2000 (to coincide with a television show on Maryland Public Television about six Maryland photographers, including Bodine) I had been living with the collection of photographs for over 30 years.  The gallery world did not know, and still does not know, how to market and sell original photographs.  That is, we would sell maybe one or two photographs per year, but most years sold none.

I'm not an artist, I'm a computer geek -- 1970 MIT EE degree, but I took all the computer courses (like maybe 4 were offered) and hung out at the AI lab, then went to work at Stanford AI Lab.  So when the computer equipment innovations started happening in early 2000s, I was ready to put it all together.

I think I have just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with Bodine's body of work.  It is now a marketing effort.

I could go on and on, but my basic feeling is that anyone can do what I have done.  In short, art sells.

My costs are low.  I'm an engineer so I do all the work.  I wrote the website -- I'm guessing it would have cost >$200,000 to have a website company write the website in 2000 when I did it -- it took me a year and mountain of credit card debt before I put down the keyboard and picked up the sample case and hit the streets to start lining up retailers.  The graphic design of the website is crappy, I know that.  But I'm too busy to spend the time needed to make it more attractive (i.e. pretty AND sticky) but I've got a ton of ideas.

I have no secrets and I am happy to explain how I do things and what my market situation is.  Just ask if interested.  From my perspective, after having sold a million dollars of product, is most people are doing it wrong.

Of course, Bodine did incredible work -- none of this would have been possible without his eye and talent and skill in the darkroom.  But that's another story.

Art Sells!

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Tony Sleep <TonySleep@...> wrote:
>
> The OP had said he'd sold 30,000 prints in 12 years, which is a truly 
> impressive number. I used to print and sell similar numbers back in 
> darkroom days when prints were the standard medium of supply, or they 
> wanted prints for reference, but nowadays buyers only want files. Not 
> surprising as I work on commission, for repro. But like most pro's I have 
> about a third as much paying work as I actually need, fees are stuck in 
> the early 1990's, and the trouble with files is that they get stolen and 
> orphaned and copyright abused. I've abandoned my public website since I 
> did an audit of just 6 pics out of the 500 or so, and found infringing 
> uses outnumbered legit, licensed use by 14:1. It's like trying to run a 
> shop in a neighbourhood full of looters.
> 
> Anyhow, I've sold about a  dozen prints in the last 5 years. So anyone 
> who's doing that well in the current environment is doing something 
> interesting to me. As you say, adapt and survive. I'd love to be able to 
> figure out some means to support more personal projects.
> 
> So I was interested enough to make some rough back of an envelope 
> estimations based around my costs.
> 
> My own print pricing is very similar to the OP's but it's one thing if 
> your business is based around commission fees and occasional stock sales, 
> plus selling an occasional print.
> 
> It's a different proposition if print sales are the main source of revenue 
> that must carry the whole cost of photography as well. And based on my 
> costs, it was clear that even if I did somehow manage to sell similar 
> numbers to the OP I still wouldn't make any money.
> 
> There are two possibilities at this point:
> - Either the OP is using prices plucked from thin air in the hope things 
> will work out well, but hasn't actually sat down and done any 
> reality-checking with Excel. This is a tragically commonplace mistake.
> - Or the OP has radically lower costs and makes a viable profit. Which is 
> what he has subsequently said is the situation.
> 
> There is no more to it than that. There is a complete answer: it works for 
> the OP, it can't work for me as my costs are as low as I can get them but 
> still prohibitive.
> -- 
> Regards
> 
> Tony Sleep
> http://tonysleep.co.uk
>