Column: The Pictorialist – The Value of Fine Art Photography

2.15.10: The Value of Fine Art Photography

More or less, you know how much a bottle of Coke, a tin of Altoids, or a can of Pringles can cost. More or less, you also know that depending on where you buy it, whether from Walgreens or Rite-Aid, from a movie theater’s concessionaire stand or from a 5-star hotel gift shop, and what the tax rate is, there will be only a slight variation in the price of each. And, more or less, you pretty much know the value of these items to you in terms of what it can do and the effect it will have on you. That’s the thing about mass-produced and mass-distributed products, the pricing structure is pretty much stable, and its values are generally accepted and understood.

But that’s not the same when it comes to photography as a fine art object for sale. Photography is available and accessible to almost all (what with it’s ubiquity), just like any stuff you can buy, but its price and value are a little more difficult to figure out and understand.

Let’s see if we can break it down a bit.

Most everything that can be had in modern life—there is both a price to be paid and a value to be gained. While it is common to mistake or confuse one for the other, the two are not the same and never equal. The price of Coke may vary by a few cents from one store to another, but it is deemed more desirable and valuable by someone who’s thirsty than by someone who’s not. Such a dynamic of price and value becomes a bit more complicated when it comes to fine art photography, where a more complex interplay of multiple factors underlie every pricing decision and every item being offered in the market. Unlike the multiple common transactions we deal with every day, in which the price structure for commodities are relatively stable and its values easily understood, the financial aspects of fine art photography as objects of desire are often viewed as shrouded in mystery. It is not something that we can all easily understand, and which only a few can fathom.

The business side of fine art photography is so complicated (or convoluted), its market players so diverse and disparate, and its yardsticks of value often without a commonly accepted standard that it requires its own particular expertise, which is separate and distinct from art appreciation itself, in order to begin to fathom and ramify its economic mysteries. Unlike commodities which are largely governed by the generally accepted economic law of supply and demand as well as consumer-oriented regulations devised and imposed by the government, the accounting of price as nothing more than cost plus profit complicated only by tax and shipment or delivery costs, the trade in fine art photography has to contend with translating to tangible numbers a number of intangibles. In order to arrive at a figure, art dealers, sellers and purveyors have to capture portions or even the entirety of a band of essences and then translate, if not convert, them into financial terms in order to make conducting business plausible and possible.

We will probably never come close to totally understanding the pricing and valuation of art photography (though we may be able to afford it), but for sure, we will be able to sense the value of its acquisition and ownership.

–Dominique James
Contact Dominique James at djphotographer@mac.com
Visit his fine art photography website at Zatista