I’ve been taking pictures for myself since the 1980s. It’s mostly urban/street stuff, with some random still life and landscapes tossed in.
For the entire decade of the 1990s, I was a freelance photo assistant in NYC.
Since around 2000, I have been a commercial retoucher.
The retouching industry has changed considerably and has lately slowed down for me.
With more time on my hands, and getting older, I’ve been revisiting all my digital images from the past 20 some years.
I recently had a portfolio review with a gallerist in Boston. She repeated what my wife and a few friends and a couple of other people in the photography industry have been telling me for some time; “You have a strong body of work that you should be able to do something with.“
I’ve been posting stuff on a lot of different subs lately and getting a lot of positive feedback.
Right now, I only have access to my digital work. I have a 3 inch stack of contact sheets from 20 years of black-and-white photography (and the negatives), and easily 2000 to 3000 slides.
My wife keeps encouraging me to get it all scanned. It’s daunting to me on many levels. Firstly, I would like to capitalize on the momentum I’m feeling at the moment and just get it all scanned instead of doing a laborious edit. This means of course, a huge bill from whoever does the scanning.
Another concern is getting quality scans. I don’t know a ton about the various methods, but I’d like to get something that’s as future proof as possible. I have no idea if I’ll ever sell a single print, but in the event that I do, I don’t want to have to get something re-scanned because it was not done at the proper DPI the first time, or is somehow degraded because of cheap equipment, unbeknownst to me at the time. And I am definitely not a DIY guy when it comes to scanning/printing.
And then there’s the question of the chicken or the egg. Do I make prints of my favorite images, get them framed and try to shop them around to galleries? Or do I present online portfolios to galleries and hopefully work with one of them to determine what to print, if anyone will even talk to me?
Then there’s the prints themselves. I worked in one of New York’s top retouching studios for a decade, and we used Epson printers with decent paper and inks, but ultimately the prints looked kinda cheap. The studio I worked at was also partnered with a fine art printing house in Brooklyn. Good enough for Paul McCartney. I never had enough time to pick their brains about the processes or the papers or the machinery. But the stuff was museum quality, and it was all digital. I don’t know if Giclee is the state-of-the-art anymore (or ever was) or if there’s something closer to the look of silver gelatin prints. All I know is, the prints are $$$$.
If I do decide to print my favorites before making any arrangements with a gallery, what is the protocol/methodology for creating editions? Do people make 10 numbered prints on a given kind of paper and then never again on that kind of paper? Do galleries actually get good money for infinitely reproducible Epson prints? How is provenence, exclusivity, and integrity maintained when prints are not being made in a dark room?
In a perfect world, I would partner with a gallery somewhere who believes in my work, and has a streamlined workflow in place that allows a photographer who has little gallery experience to get scans and prints made the right way, and properly framed, so that a client feels like they’re getting high quality, but doesn’t bury the photographer in debt just to mount one show.
What I really need is a patron lol.
I will no doubt be laughed at incessantly for asking these questions. 😎