Landscape Photography as a Career: Monetizing Art

I have watched a few YoutTube videos recently from professional landscape photographers. That is to say those that make a living from activities related to landscape photography. These include Ben Horne, Thomas Heaton, and Mark Denney. In each case these guys have pulled back the curtain on how they make their money and in Mark's case how much they make. I have been curious about this for a few reasons, first I entertained the idea of joining the fray in some form, second I had thought perhaps this could allow me to retire early, and finally I was genuinely curious if one could make a living selling ones art. 

If I generalize from these three photographers, the thing I learned is nobody makes all their money selling their art. They all rely on ad or user fees. My guess is that Ben may be the only one who makes more than half his income from selling prints and portfolios. The rest are essentially selling ads or subscriptions. 

Let me say this right away, these guys and many others are very talented and certainly better at what they do than I am. I think Thomas Heaton was perhaps most honest in a video he did with Nick Carver in that he said that Nick was the only professional photographer in the video as Nick's 9-5 job is architectural photography. Thomas was right up front that he derived most of his income from ads and affiliations with selling photos being a small fraction of his income. Others have commented that what is being sold is an experience to be lived vicariously. It is in a sense reality TV. 

Let me also say that there is nothing wrong with this in my mind. It is the miracle of an online world that allows someone to monetize their work without the traditional gatekeepers of galleries, exhibitions, contests, awards, and art critics who all must be buttered up in some way. Digital media has in many ways democratized art by allowing artists new ways to find an audience and more recently monetize it. To be sure there are still gatekeepers like Google but the hurdles are lower.

The costs of this new medium is that one has to put up with an unfiltered set of followers and the obnoxious views of some of them and you need to interact with your audience. One is also forced to get on what I refer to as the 'social media treadmill'. That is the constant creation of videos on YouTube and postings to Instagram. The effort and time to make these videos is not trivial as the production value needs to be very high to attract a following. Technology has generally made the tools for this very accessible. This was the primary reason I chose not to go down this route, I did not want my art to become a chore. (It is also true that I managed to retire early on the back of my personal savings. This allows me more freedom with respect to my time and the kind of work I do chose to do in pursuit of my personal vision.)

Other Artists

Recently I visited Santa Fe New Mexico on holiday and visited a number of galleries and spoke to a few artists. It was great to visit a place so focused on art as it refreshed some of my own creative energies but it also caused me to reflect on  the way art is monetized now and in the past. Santa Fe revolves very much around the gallery scene but digital has of course subtly influenced the commercial side of art. Most artists offer inkjet (called giclée) prints of their work and the gallery can offer different sizes and prices 'on-demand'. The giclée prints on display are so-called double-signed where the original painting was of course signed then digitized and printed where it is again signed in the opposite corner. This assures you it is work endorsed or made by the artist.  

Now we never ordered one of these prints and so I don't actually know what happens if you ask for a Giclée print of custom dimensions; do you get a double signed copy some days later. I presume this is the case otherwise it is little better than the postcard business. Certainly the prices seemed to indicate this would be the case. Of course this then brings us back to monetization. Originals are worth much more than copies (10x or more), copies that are signed are worth more than those that are not. Signed copies of a limited edition are worth still more. 

(A word about giclée: This was a word adopted by the art community when ink-jet prints were first being made. There was a desire to stay away from the term ink-jet as many people had cheap inkjet printers in their homes at the time and it certainly wouldn't do to charge thousands of dollars for something that could printed off in one's kitchen. Someone (Jack Duganne) decided to adopt a French word to give the process more cachet hence the word giclée. Alas giclée also appears to be a slang term for ejaculate, illustrating that one should be careful when adopting words in a foreign language.)

Digitization of Fine Art

I have some technical questions in regard to these reproductions. They are digitized in some fashion either with a camera or a scanner. One presumes it is a very precise process with very high fidelity in terms of resolution and color rendition. We looked at one artist who works in watercolor and were informed they of course paint on a cotton rag paper which has some texture. How this is resolved in the digitized image isn't clear to me. The gallery owner said they were reproduced using a giclée print using 'artist inks' (some places used the more conventional term archival inks) on a cotton rag paper prepared for inkjet printing. This of course reproduces the texture of the original though I am not sure how the digitized texture interacts with the real texture of the paper itself. In this case the artist also deckled the edges of the originals as well as the reproductions.

At another gallery we had a really good discussion with the artist David Rothermel who has his own gallery. This conversation with David was fascinating on a number of levels which I may relate in a later post here. David had been around Taos and Santa Fe for decades being a formally trained artist from New York in his youth. My wife and I were discussing if we could afford one of his reproductions as we liked his work. (Alas we could not as even the reproductions were beyond our meagre budget.) 

David had a couple of prints we were interested in one was a double signed Giclée print described above. Another was an old-style lithograph made on a 4 color press with the offset printing patterns visible under magnification. I wondered which one was worth more. Both are reproductions with the Giclée being much higher resolution of 300 dpi or higher. Lithographs are typically half that resolution. However Giclée can be printed one after another by hitting the print button. Lithographs are expensive to setup and have limited print runs. One thing that David also does is 'hand-embellish' his prints. That is he adds some paint directly to the giclée print to boost tonal values and lend a different look and authenticity to each copy. This again enhances the value in that he has performed some work on the piece and means that each print is unique.

Let us not forget that art is still a very big business and even in Santa Fe they are not immune to trends. I have a great great uncle named Frank Applegate who was part of the original Santa Fe artists community (he died well be fore I was born). He hung out with the likes of Georgia O'Keefe, Ansel Adams, and Mary Austin. In Santa Fe there is a gallery run by Gerald Peters who specializes in Frank Applegate work and until recently Mr. Peters lived in Frank's old house. We went to the gallery on a kind of pilgrimage and were disappointed to find that he was not displaying any of Frank's work as the normal gallery season had ended. Anyway the point of bringing this up was that I researched more about Gerald Peters and he has certainly gone big on the southwest arts scene. He has galleries in Dallas and New York primarily because that is where the big money is to be found.  He also built a new set of galleries just off Canyon road to house his exhibitions. One houses the traditional southwestern artists but the other is dedicated to modern art. By which I mean pieces made from neon lights and different media and more directly political than what I would have expected from regional or indigenous artists. Indeed modern abstract art has been bolted onto the Santa Fe art scene in general. 

I discussed with David Rothermel the idea that he also had both representation southwestern art and abstract modern art in his gallery. He said this was in response to the trend towards more houses that have a modern design ethos and the market for art with a cleaner more modern look. He indicated he tended to prefer representational art but he also reflected that it felt good to get back in touch with abstract work which he really hadn't done since art school. So he was responding to the market both in a commercial sense but also in a genuine artistic sense. 

Finally I come to my own internal conflicts in this area. I am torn between pursuing my work as a personal journey and seeking outside recognition. I have been encouraged to seek more commercial recognition and have certainly worked in industry where things are valued if someone is willing to part with money in exchange with them. So there is some draw in that direction. However I value the independence and probably also the lack of criticism that comes from not seeking more formal recognition. Right now I am erring on the side of working through a personal journey whether from a sense of independence and freedom or from fear is hard to separate at this point.