A lot of people who like looking at art have quietly decided they are not allowed to buy any. The reasoning is rarely spoken out loud and it goes something like this. Buying art is what collectors do, collecting is a specialist activity with its own vocabulary and its own prices, and anyone who does not know the vocabulary would be embarrassing themselves. So they buy a poster instead, or nothing.
In short · 4 min read
- In Edo Japan, woodblock prints cost about as much as a bowl of noodles.
- Editions and proofs explained in plain language.
- Buying to live with: questions about the image, the wall and the size.
It is worth knowing how recent and how local that assumption is.
In Edo period Japan, prints were an ordinary consumer good. Nishiki-e, the multicoloured woodblock prints, were expensive when the technique was new and then dropped in price until they cost roughly the same as a bowl of noodles. They were sold in specialist shops called ezōshiya, and by hawkers in the street who rolled them into a cylinder and handed them over, which is more or less how posters are sold today. The images now behind glass in museums, the waves and the bridges in the rain, were made for people who were not collectors and did not think of themselves as buying art. They were buying a picture they liked.
The vocabulary that intimidates people is mostly the vocabulary of one market, and it is worth translating into plain language.
What matters in that list is that limitation is a decision somebody made, not a property of the object.
An original is a one of a kind object, and for photography this idea gets strange quickly, because a photograph is made from a negative or a file that can produce many identical prints. An open edition means the maker will print as many as people want. A limited edition means the maker has promised in advance to stop at a certain number, and usually to destroy or retire the means of making more. An artist's proof is a print outside the numbered run, historically a working copy, now often just a slightly rarer thing to sell.
What matters in that list is that limitation is a decision somebody made, not a property of the object. A photograph in an edition of ten and the same photograph in an open edition are physically identical pieces of paper. The scarcity is added afterwards, deliberately, because scarcity is what allows a price to rise later. There is nothing dishonest about this. It is how the market is designed and everybody in it knows the rules. It is simply worth understanding that you are being sold two things, the picture and the guarantee about how many exist, and that only one of them will be on your wall.
If you are buying to invest, the second thing is the important one and you should learn the market properly before spending anything. If you are buying something to live with, it is close to irrelevant, and a great deal of anxiety disappears the moment that is clear.
Which leaves the questions that actually apply. Will you still want to look at it in five years, or is it working mostly on novelty. Where would it go, specifically, in which room and on which wall, and what else is already on that wall. Does it survive being seen every day, because a picture in a home is not visited once with fresh attention, it is walked past several hundred times a year and gradually stops being noticed unless there is enough in it to keep finding.
The practical constraints are duller and cost more than people expect. Size is the one that catches everybody out. A picture that looks generous in a photograph of somebody else's room is often smaller than the wall needs, and going up one size costs less than the framing usually does. Framing is where budgets quietly go, which is one reason a print that arrives already framed and ready to hang is worth comparing honestly against the cheaper unframed version plus what the frame will actually cost.
They were putting something on a wall because they wanted to see it again tomorrow.
This is roughly the thinking behind how the Photo Art is sold. Every piece begins as a real photograph, the framed prints come in a range of sizes and arrive ready to go on the wall, and nothing is edition limited to manufacture scarcity. The intention is that somebody who likes an image can own it without first having to become a collector.
Hokusai and Hiroshige were commercial printmakers working for a mass market, and the prints that made their names were cheap, popular and sold in the street. They are now among the most reproduced images in the world and the surviving impressions sell for a great deal of money, which is a fair description of what happens when something ordinary lasts long enough. Nobody buying one at the time was making an investment. They were putting something on a wall because they wanted to see it again tomorrow.
A quiet extension of this idea
Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.
