Musing July 2013
The Limitations of Limited Editions
I am often asked why I do or don’t edition my work. Historically the idea of edition prints came out of printmaking and is generally understood to mean a number of prints made from the same original, using similar materials. There are different kinds of editions, those in the medium in which the artist actually worked and reproduction prints of original prints or paintings, sometimes made during the life of the artist and other times after their death. Limited editions are often signed and numbered with the combined purposes of validation and increasing value.
Photography is different from other forms of printmaking and I think should be viewed from this separate standing. Early in its history, photography split into two branches, the positive process and the negative process. The first photographic process was the Daguerreotype. These were “one of a kind” images made on polished metal. This process evolved into the Tintype, Ambrotype and eventually into the Polaroid print. Color slides are also one of a kind but various processes made the reproduction of them unlimited. The negative process began with salted paper process and evolved through wet plate negative, dry plate negatives, film and most recently into the digital world today. Unlimited numbers of prints can be made from a single negative.
At first it sounds like a win-win situation to produce your photographs as limited editions prints. If you make your prints in limited editions you are make only a predetermined number of a particular image at a particular size in a particular process. The collector, knowing that they are buying one of a particular number of that image, perceives that they are investing in something of a particular value. If the image is popular and becomes scarce (i.e. you sell out many of the prints in the edition) then the price rises for the later prints and you have made money.
As always, there is another side to this story. The artist ties up time and resources making x number of prints when there may be little or no demand for these prints. Once you have committed to this run of prints, you have limited future options for re-visiting this image as your skills, vision and materials change and improve. If you have made a limited number of a particular image and it does become popular, it is often not you but the secondary market that reaps the financial gain. Unlike artists making prints with stone or plate in which the lower numbered prints are considered the most valuable, galleries and collectors want the highest numbered photographic prints. They are not interested in number 1/25 or 2/25 but they want 25/25. However, you have to sell the first 24 to get to number 25. It can be both a storage and bookkeeping ordeal to keep track of numbered prints.
The notion of limiting individual prints rubs me the wrong way. To begin with every platinum print is slightly different from another, unlike silver or digital prints. They are handmade one at a time and each print is affected by humidity, paper, age of developer and slight variations in the platinum chemistry. Years ago I did limit some platinum prints for my first major show in San Francisco. It was an arbitrary limit of 25. Perhaps I should have printed all copies of the prints in that exhibit at that time but didn’t due to cost and time restraints. I would have had to make 750, 16 x 20 perfect prints in order to make those editions. That is a lot of prints to make, to store and to keep track of. Furthermore it would have cost me $15,000 for the platinum material alone, a sum I would not have been able to raise at the time. I did print five copies of each print in the show. Needless to say all of them didn’t sell. I still, nearly twenty years later, have these in inventory.
Another problem, the original 8 x 10 film negative still exists, but the enlarged negatives are no longer usable. The materials used to make the enlarged negatives were never intended to be a permanent record. I would have to remake the enlarged negatives in a different process, this time digitally. The paper I made those prints on is no longer available. In fact I have had to change my papers of choice five to six times as papers have changed or become unavailable. I could not match exactly the prints I made twenty years ago if I tried because of these changes in material. The materials have changed, I have changed, and my interpretation of the negative has changed. I hope I am a better printer now than I was then. Today the last print of one of these limited editions might have only a vague resemblance to the original print.
Other than my quarterly print specials I don’t number my prints any more. I usually only print one or two copies and move on to new work. We hang 40 to 50 new images in our gallery each year. A few favorites stay over from year to year but I am more concerned with making new images and prints than rehashing old images. My prints are not numbered but they are limited, simply by the fact I only make a couple of each. If someone wants a print of an older image I gladly make it. The print is made exclusively for them and will probably be slightly different from any other version of that print. By implication limited editions of prints are all exactly the same. I hope, as I grow as an artist, that I make a better print each time I revisit an old negative. That way, every print I make is an edition of one, each unique in its own way.