I have been noticing that there are some pretty wild ideas about how much to charge for a photograph in the fine-art market out there. So I was pleasantly surprised to find an article entitled back to that discussion about pricing, written by photographer Chris Rauschenberg. Key quote: “The decisions that you make about price and edition size will determine how many of your prints are out in the world, being seen, thrilling people, and eventually flowing into museum collections.”

I’m not sure whether Chris would agree with this or not, but I think that any emerging photographer (where by “emerging” I here loosely mean “having no or almost no name recognition in the market”) would not want to overprice their photos (so far Chris would probably agree), which means that if you can’t sell a huge print for less, then simply have smaller prints (let’s stop pretending that everybody determines print sizes purely from thinking about which size works best, please!). And if you can’t have smaller prints then sell your big prints for less.

Let’s say you’re in a group show and it’s maybe your first group show and your photograph is to be sold for more than a photograph by someone who has already published two books and who has been selling work left and right: That will only leave people scratching their heads.