Chapter 10 | Why Fine Art
Chapter 10 | Why Fine Art
One of the things I’ve yet to share with you concerns one of my first experiences with publication type sales. Publication is the kind of work you’ve certainly heard about and most definitely have seen. Publications like National Geographic, Life Magazine, Popular Photography, Sierra Club Calendars and the like, use images in their publications which they purchase from folks like you and me. There are a vast many people who are part of this industry.
My first encounter was when it was suggested to me that I should submit one of my images to Sierra Club for publication in their renowned calendar. They must have liked it because they published it in their week based yearly calendars.
The surprise came when I got a check in the mail for $250. You do the math, because my calculations seemed like it might be hard to raise the family on that. And at the time I’d already been doing shows that were producing significantly better results.
Since then I’ve been published in National Geographic, Popular Photography, Life Magazine and a number of other lesser known, periodicals.
It wasn’t a difficult decision at the time, even though it seemed to be more elite being a publication ‘artist.’ There was however a single train of mind that kept me in the artist lane vs. the publication lane. I had decided to use a huge camera, the 8x10, whereas the publication photographers were almost exclusively using the much smaller, but agreeably, more versatile 35mm or 645 medium format camera systems. And for the kind of thing they were doing, images never being enlarged for print beyond the typical 8x11 format of a magazine it made sense, but not for what I wanted to do. Which was to go as large as possible without losing detail. I wanted people to feel like they were standing right there next to me. The 8x10 format made that a reality. You’d feel like you were right there.
My thinking was that I could easily make my images smaller, but they couldn’t really make theirs larger. If you ever put a 35mm image next to an image made from an 8x10 piece of film, where the photograph is larger than say 20x25 inches, the difference is distinctly recognizable.
In fine art, that matters.
The other train of thought was that a photograph, of the proper type and stored correctly, would easily outlast a paper print from a magazine. So effectively a photograph from a large piece of film would ultimately look better and last longer. Those two things, with the added – sells for a lot more, made the decision very easy in the end.
For any of you who have been able to visit one of my galleries over the years, could probably attest to the clarity of a Fine Art ‘Rodney’ original.