There's a fairly well known story in which a Zen
master tells his students, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill
him." This wasn't an exhortation to commit murder, it was an
attempt to force the students to re-evaluate what they held most
dear, to reconsider everything they considered fundamental.
For years, I've made what I think are beautiful,
labor intensive gelatin silver prints of my photographs.
Recently, I've started printing my photographs digitally, and the
properties of the digital printing process are so fundamentally
different that they've changed the way I
think about prints entirely. My old conceptions about the value of a
print as an object, the importance of a print, even the permanence of a print -
they are all in tatters.
I have met the Buddha on the road. Dare I kill
him?
What's the difference?
Before I started printing digitally, I made
conventional gelatin silver prints of my photographs, just as
everyone else did. Each
time I wanted to print an image, I went into the darkroom, and I put
the negative in the enlarger. If it was the first time I
printed the image, I'd go through a long, exploratory process,
figuring out how I wanted the print to look.
Sometimes this process would take lots of trial prints, spread over
a period of days.
In the end, I'd have the print the way I wanted it
(more likely, it was as close as I could get to the way I wanted
it). I'd carefully write down my notes on how to make that
print, and while I was at it, I'd make multiple prints.
Hopefully I'd print enough to last my lifetime, and I'd never come
back to that image in the darkroom unless I wanted it printed
differently.
Some images are easy to print, and if I made six
prints, all six would be 'keepers'. Other images are hard to
print, and a little mistake while burning or dodging or bleaching meant
the print was destined for the trashcan. One of my teachers taught me
that the most useful tool in the darkroom is the trashcan, and he
was not joking. I have some images that so tax my printing
skills that I need to make six or seven prints to get one that I am
happy with. In my darkroom, I have a very big trashcan.
As far as I can tell, all this is pretty much the
same process used by other photographers who print their own work.
In any case, each of those prints I made represented
not only the hours of figuring out how I wanted the image to look
(and how to make it look that way) but also the time spent exposing
the paper, processing the paper, washing it, toning, it, drying it,
flattening it, spotting it. If I used up all the prints I had in stock, and
had to make more, the minimum time to make another was hours - time
spent setting up the darkroom, printing from my notes, adjusting
things to allow for a different batch of paper, making half a dozen
prints, processing, washing, drying , flattening the prints, and
cleaning up the mess afterward. Different people feel
differently but for me this work, none of it creative, all falls
into that category Brett Weston called 'sheer, brutal
drudgery.'
With digital printing, this has all changed. I
still spend hours exploring the possibilities, and in figuring out
how to make the image look just the way I want it. That much
has not changed.
But now, when I'm all done, I click on the 'print'
button, and my printer whirrs and clunks and whooshes, and out comes
a print. If I click on the button again, another print comes
out, exactly like the first one. And get this: I save
the work on my array of hard disks, and I can come back a week
later, a month later, decades later, open up that file, click on
'print', and the printer whirrs and clunks and whooshes, and out
comes a print, exactly like the one I'd made before.
And the time it takes me to make that print is very
short - if you discount the time spent waiting for the printer to do
it's job, and count only the time I'm engaged in the process, it's a
matter of a couple of minutes. The cost of making another
print is not hours of my time and perhaps dozens of dollars, it's a
couple of minutes and (depending on the print size) a buck or two.
Cheap prints/expensive prints.
In the old world of silver printing, if I was
confronted with a choice between selling 20 prints at 50 bucks
apiece, or two prints at $500, I'd choose to sell two prints at
$500, hands down. Two prints is a lot less of my time than 20
prints - heck, just the thought of filling an order for 20 gelatin
silver prints makes me tremble with fear.
But in the new world of digital printing, all this
has been turned upside down. Not only do I not prefer to sell two
expensive prints to score $1000, I positively prefer to sell 20
prints for $50. Remember, each $50 print might cost me $3 in
materials, and two minutes of my time. That means that I'm
spending two minutes of my time to earn $47 in profit - a pay scale
that works out to better than $20 a minute! Sure, if I sold
two prints, the pay scale would be higher, but I'm fine with
$20/minute.
And get this: every print I sell (or you sell) is
not just a print, it's an advertisement. The real cost of
doing business is the cost of getting visibility. That's why
we have web sites, and scramble so frantically for gallery shows.
Those lovely prints you have in a box - they'll
never sell unless people SEE them. If they were hanging on the
wall in someone's house, the probability that some potential
customer would see them and buy a copy themselves goes from zero to
not very high - a small but significant improvement. Every
print of yours that's hanging on a wall somewhere is another print
that's generating visibility for you.
Beyond these simple facts, there's a fundamental
truth we all have been ignoring for far too long. That
fundamental truth is this: there's a price that represents the
maximum profit you can reap from a product. If you raise the
price higher than that, your profits decrease because the increased
price diminishes demand. If you lower the price lower than
that point, the profits decrease because below a certain price,
demand does not rise any more.
And in our heart of hearts we all know, really, that the demand for our
works is low, and that the reason is that prints are just too damn
expensive. But until now, unless you were willing to spend the
rest of your life in a room lit by a dim, red bulb, there wasn't a
damn thing you could do about it.
The print is nothing. The image is everything.
Suppose someone wants to buy a print of one of my
photographs. I'm sufficiently mercenary that I'm happy to sell
him a print - and the price I charged him for a silver print had
little to do with the cost of the materials I needed to make the
print. What the accountants among us call 'cost of goods sold'
was low, but the price of the print was really based on the
'replacement cost' - and thus basically a measure of how much of my
lifetime I'd have to relinquish to make another print to replace the
one I'd sold. And that time was hours and hours and hours.
That's why when I printed an image, I'd make half a dozen prints
when I got it right, and why I have boxes and boxes of prints in my
workroom - I was attempting to amortize the cost of making the
prints across multiple prints, and thus lower the replacement cost.
Everything about the process meant that I was ahead
to keep prices of prints high, and keep my production low.
But in the world of digital printing, the cost of
replacing that print is not hours and hours, it's two minutes.
If someone orders a print of an image I've printed before, I can
read the email order when I start my day, and I can be done making
the print before I've finished my first cup of tea - and I can relax
and drink my tea while I do it.
I recently shocked a group of photographers by
suggesting that if I hung a show consisting of digital prints, when
the show came down, rather than pay money for boxes to store the
prints, I'd just destroy the prints. If later on I discover I
need the prints again, I'll just go to my computer, click on
'print', and a little while later, I have fresh, unscuffed,
undamaged prints in my hands. Why bother storing replaceable
pieces of paper?
I caused even more shock when I revealed my new
satisfaction guarantee plan to a photographer friend. My
prints have always come with a satisfaction guarantee - if the
purchaser doesn't like the print for any reason, all they needed to
do was return the print to me unharmed, and I'd return their money.
But now, why should I insist that they send the
print back to me? After all, the cost for me to make a new
print is lower than the cost of shipping the print back to me.
So here's my radical, revolutionary plan...
If a customer doesn't like the print, I'll just have
them fold the print up, tear out the center, and send the central
portion back in an envelope. Once I have clear evidence the
print is destroyed, I'll send back their money. And when
another buyer wants a print of that image, I'll go to my computer,
and click on 'print', and have a cup of tea while the printer
whirrs.
One last example - this past year, I contributed two
gelatin silver prints to a local art auction. Too late, I
realized that a good friend of mine who lives across the continent
could easily contribute a print, too. All he had to do was
send the image to me electronically, and I'd make the print on my
printer (which is exactly the same as the printer he uses).
There's no need to ship the print across the country at all!
Why ship a 30"x40" print when he can just send me the image via the
internet? And the print made on my printer will be exactly the
same as one made on his printer. Exactly.
Radical ideas, every one of them. And I've
just scratched the surface!
Oh, Brave New World, that has such things in it!
Photography has always come tantalizingly close to being an
artistic medium with perfect reproducibility. The physical
limitations of gelatin silver printing, however, generated this
frustrating gap - the only way hundreds or thousands of people could
own copies of our art was if we managed to get a book of our work
done.
Digital prints, however, have already changed all that.
Like the world of musical performance facing the advent of digital
recording and distribution via the internet, we're confronting an
unavoidable sea change as high quality digital printing becomes
widespread.
High quality digital prints - digital prints with physical
properties that match or exceed those of gelatin silver prints, and
artistic properties that are to variable contrast paper what a
chain saw is to a stone axe - those digital prints have taken the
lid off the can of worms. Such digital prints will reveal the
true value of the art we make at the same time they point out the
foolishness of our artificially inflated print prices. There
is no way to put the worms back in the can.
Digital printing is not the solution to every problem.
There are no panaceas, and the world of photography is no exception
to this rule. My digital files can be rendered obsolete simply
by the passage of time, when the format they're stored in is no
longer supported by any current software. But these problems
will not stave off the inevitable change in how we value our work,
how we get compensated for our work, and how others relate to our
work.
Yesterday, I struggled for hours and hours to get an image just
the way I wanted. This morning, I discovered I'd left the
print I made yesterday out on the table, and my beloved dog had
gotten slobber on it. I smiled, and fondly rubbed my
dog's ears, and then I took the once beautiful print and tore it
into shreds, threw the shreds into the trashcan, and put the kettle
on to make tea. I sat down at my computer, and before the
water had come to a boil I'd clicked 'print' and my printer had
already started its comforting 'whoosh, whoosh, whoosh' as it made
me another print, just like the one I'd torn up but without the dog
slobber.