The ‘limited edition’ concept has always been a dubious one when applied to photographs, and has become rather meaningless with the arrival of digital technologies. Yet, it has become immensely popular precisely with digital era photographers, and it is worth pausing to ask why?

The limited edition idea originated out of the physical realities of traditional (non-photographic) print making: the print plate has a finite life, and can only produce a limited number of prints, of a progressively deteriorating quality.

But photographic processes are not like that. In its analogue form, the negative doesn’t deteriorate meaningfully due to the nature of the process alone, and so any desired number of prints can be produced. The quantity limit is dictated purely by the speed and costs of the process used to produce the positive, and if you were to automate it, you could have a machine to produce a large number of cheap, but not very satisfactory, prints.

I say not very satisfactory, because that’s the reality of the analogue print; a straight negative inversion is not enough to leverage the full potential of the negative to produce a print of a high standard (in the same way as nowadays a straight print of the camera raw sensor output would not). But with an analogue print the ‘post processing’ happens at the printing stage, and so a high quality print (what is often referred to somewhat pretentiously as a ‘fine art print’) is always hand made, and the process is time consuming.

This has a number of implications: (a) there is a fairly low limit on the number of ‘fine art’ prints that can be produced this way, (b) no two of such prints are identical, and (c) there is a quantifiable value in the making of the print (in the simplest terms measurable by an hourly wage). But this makes the limited edition concept entirely superfluous: such a handmade ‘fine art’ print is never just a reproduction (of some other print).

With digital photography the limited edition concept becomes even less meaningful. Since the post processing happens now outside of the print making, the printing itself is a purely mechanical process. Consequently, (a) the number of prints that can be produced has become near infinite, (b) they will be all identical in every detail, and, critically, (c) such prints are very cheap to produce.

This, of course, presents the digital era photographer with a huge problem: on what basis do you ask £500 for a print that costs £20 to run off? Whereas the analogue printer can at least try to justify this by, say, the forty hours of skilled craft spent in the darkroom working on that one individual print, the digital photographer struggles. And, worse, so does the potential buyer.

Limited Edition to the rescue!

But, of course, limited edition thus construed is nothing other than artificial scarcity, and artificial scarcity doesn’t add anything to the value of the object itself, i.e., a limited edition will not turn a mediocre print into a good one. Nor do folk who buy photographic prints on the basis of the limited edition status (assuming such folk still even exist) buy them because they are good, but rather because, speculatively, perhaps they might magically appreciate in value in time.

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The question that necessarily emerges from the above deliberation is, where does the value of a photographic print arise from? And the answer to this question will depend on whether you are the photographer or the potential buyer.

For me as the photographer, the value is two fold. Firstly, there are the tangibles: the planning, the time spent on location, the necessary skill in taking, and processing it, the material costs of it, which all adds up. And secondly, there is the hard to quantify, but all important, visual appeal of the image itself — this is a satisfying photograph I have here.

When it comes to the potential buyer, me the photographer might very well wish all the tangibles would feed in, but the reality is they do not, very few of us buy photographs because we think the photographer’s photoshop skills first rate (this causes particular chagrin to me the analogue printer, because the extra skill and effort to produce a ‘fine art’ analogue print is really very considerable). But for me the buyer the visual appeal is the all important factor, and perhaps the perceived prestige of owning something by a famous photographer.

In other words, the photograph has two different values: what it is worth to me the photographer, and what it is worth to me the potential buyer; and they do not necessarily meet. Generally speaking, for them to meet, the cost of the tangibles would need to be negligible relative to the value of the visual appeal the buyer sees in the photograph. But in today’s world awash with digital imagery, such value tends to be very low (after all, it’s just a photograph).

The big question then is, do I sell prints for less than they are worth to me the photographer? The answer to that might very well be different to different people for a variety reasons, but for myself, it is a definite no. To do so would be to cheapen the craft, and ultimately myself, and I’d rather give a way my prints than do that.

There is, of course, the risk that I am overestimating the quality of my work, and some critical self reflection time from time is necessary and healthy; but never settle for ‘they are just photographs’, if nothing else, ‘they are my photographs’ that I have some history with.

P.S. I have a confession: I have only bought two photographic prints in the last twenty five years, the second of which is arriving the day after tomorrow; good prints, the sort of prints worth hanging on the wall for years, are hard to find, escpecially at ‘reasonable’ prices.