PDN - July 2012

of an image produced in a different medium. In other words, the law in New York seems to allow for multiple editions of photographic works, as long as buyers are notified of earlier editions. (Laws governing limited editions and multiples vary by state, but California’s law is similar to New York’s.)

While Eggleston may have the law on his side, not everyone thinks he has the moral high ground. Novak, for one, minces no words.

“Whether it’s illegal or not, it’s unethical” to issue new editions that previous buyers had no warning might be created, he says. “It hurts the people you’ve sold to previously.” And photographers hurt themselves by diluting the market value of their work and their name, which takes so much effort to build up in the first place.

“It’s greedy and piggish,” he continues. “I find it disgusting. I recently walked away from a photographer who did this … When you tell the market, ‘I’m going to limit,’ then you lie by doing other editions, you should be punished for it.” (Novak says multiple editions are OK as long as the photographer announces all of them before he or she starts selling any of them.)

What galls many successful fine-art photographers is that the direct benefits of the rising value of their work goes mostly to collectors, in the form of fantastic gains on the resale value of their prints. That’s often what drives photographers to issue new editions after previous editions have sold out: They want to profit from their name and work—which seems, after all, like a divine right of capitalism—and not leave all the spoils to collectors.

Sobel’s lawyer counters that artists benefit financially by limiting their editions: Collectors pay a premium to buy limited-edition prints from artists like Eggleston in the first place. The limit raises the present value of the work, because it is more likely to increase in value later on than a print that isn’t limited. Moreover, if collectors like Sobel help drive up a photographer’s name recognition by bringing their current work into public awareness, the photographer can then charge higher prices than they otherwise might for prints of their later work.

Novak agrees with that argument. “But a
lot of photographers don’t have confidence
in themselves, or their ability to produce ne w
work,” he adds, so they issue new editions
of old work and “lots of dealers continue to
sell it.” One consequence of this practice is
that many art collectors don’t buy photog-
raphy, he says. “They shy away from tradi-
tional photographers because they can’t
trust them.” (By traditional photographers,
he means documentary or commercial pho-
tographers who cross over into the fine-art
market, as opposed to artists who use pho-
tography as a medium.)

A Short hiStory of Limited-edition PhotogrAPhy

For much of the twentieth century, most photographers didn’t issue limited-edition prints. Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander and others printed on demand. Edward Weston, one of the first to issue limited editions, was an exception, but didn’t complete many of his editions because demand didn’t warrant it.

In the Seventies, Ansel Adams announced he would stop printing his images, which drove up the prices of his work. By the late-Eighties, the idea of limiting editions to create scarcity and drive up prices started to catch on among many photo dealers and photographers.

“The typical edition was 50 to 100” prints at that time, says dealer Alex Novak. Ironically, the practice of issuing limited editions increased the supply of photographic prints, notes Stephen Perloff, editor of The Photo Review. Photographers used to print as needed, usually only a few images at a time, he explains. Once they started printing entire editions, a lot of prints got made, but many never sold.

Of course, the market (collectors, dealers, photographers) focuses attention on the effects of scarcity on the images that sell, not the images that sit in dealers’ drawers. Adams’s “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” which the photographer printed more than 1,000 times, is the oft-cited example. The prints still fetch tens of thousands of dollars, which begs the question: What might it be worth if there were far fewer of them?

Which brings us to contemporary artists like Andreas Gursky, who prints his works in large formats, and in editions of fewer than ten. One of his works, “Rhein II,” was auctioned last fall for $4.3 million. (The work was from an edition of six.)

Perloff observes, “The numbers in an edition have
definitely decreased. Ten used to be very rare, fewer unheard
of. Now they’re common. It started with the ‘artists’ and
migrated to the ‘photographers.’ Eggleston is a fine example
as his dealers try to move him into the contemporary art
market both by making much larger prints and by making
much smaller editions.”
Photographers face a dilemma in determining the size of
their editions: How to balance the positive effects of scarcity
on price against the negative effects of closing off their
artistic (and economic) options. Setting an edition size is a
crapshoot, though, because there’s no way to predict future
demand for your work.

What hasn’t changed, though, are the long odds against any demand at all. Only a tiny fraction of limited editions ever sell out. Making a work scarce doesn’t boost its value unless collectors take an interest in the work for some other reason first (e.g., the work is esthetically stunning, or it’s by, say, Gursky.) Then, limiting the number of copies can be a huge benefit, and a trap, too.