HOW TO START A PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION - PART 3

Photo by Geraint Smith

Smart strategies for how—and where—to begin buying fine-art photographs

By Bill Shapiro

One thing you absolutely have to understand is the importance of prints and editions.

Once you have a stronger sense of what you like, what might look good in your home,

how much you want to spend — and once you begin to search for pictures that meet

those criteria — you’ll need to know a few key terms. If older photographs are your cup of tea, one of the first terms you’ll come across is “vintage print.” A vintage print simply means that the photograph was printed — either by the photographer or someone they were directly supervising — at about the time the photograph was originally taken. These are prized, Bellows explains, “because collectors want something that brings you closer to the moment in time when the photographer made the picture, closer to what they were seeing, what they were feeling.” 

The term “modern print,” on the other hand, means the photo you’re looking at was

likely not printed by the photographer (a “posthumous print” speaks for itself), meaning that it’s a step removed from the photographer’s original vision and, in general, of less value. If the photo was “printed later,” it could mean that the photographer still printed or oversaw the printing, but those are typically not as prized as a vintage print.

Whether you’re considering vintage or modern photographs, you will almost certainly

come across the concept of “editions.” Paintings, of course, are one-of-a-kind works, but because photographs are made from negatives, they can, in theory, be reproduced ad infinitum. But because scarcity gives pictures their value, fine-art photographers typically limit the number of copies they print. An edition can be any size, but the smaller, the better; 10 to 20 is typical, and there are often separate editions for different print sizes. So an 11 x 14-inch print might be an edition of 10, but the same image printed 20 x 24, might be an edition of five. All things being equal, if you buy a print from an edition of three, the scarcity principle dictates that it will be more valuable than if you bought the same print from an edition of 150. Some galleries offer an incentive to early buyers, with the first four prints in an edition selling for, say, $1,000; the next three for $1500; and the last three for $2,000. 

[Click here to read part 4]