We’re Lowering Prices! We’re Raising Prices!

Let me be honest about how photography is purchased through my gallery. There are two general types of sale.

One type is your basic retail transaction and is driven by folks off the street who wander into the gallery. They may be hikers, ski bums, local families or tourists. Maybe they have followed my work online and are stoked to visit. Maybe they come for the gallery events. These sales are made up of a greeting card or maybe a set of four. Maybe a calendar. Sometimes folks will fall in love with a print and decide to walk out with an 8x10, maybe we frame it for them in a simple, clean black metal frame. As a special occasion, these same customers may save up for a piece of artwork that costs as much as $1000, but it might be their first purchase of art at that price and scale. I’m so grateful to these people for spending their hard-earned money on my work.

A second type of sale is a deeply considered purchase made by people who are seeking to make a high-impact artistic statement in their homes, offices or vacation properties. Often, these clients have purchased high-value artwork before. They are fluent in such concepts as limited editions and archival materials, and are very cognizant of the quality and market value of my large-format photography. Their expectation when purchasing art from me is that we’ll collaborate on the curation of the specific print. We’ll offer mockups and recommendations for dimensions and placements. We’ll customize the sizing, frames, finishes, etc. to better fit the design language of their space. We’ll provide white-glove delivery and installation services. For this type of sale, the price tag is important, but the higher priority is in creating the perfect piece of artwork that fits the space like a glove, and which helps to build a sense of space that perfectly represents the culture and aesthetics of the owner. 

Both of these types of support are deeply important to me and my business. We can’t survive without the business that ALL of our customers honor us with. It’s a privilege to be able to service a broad slice of the population. I’ve often struggled with how to price my work in order to both be accessible to anyone who connects with my photography, and to be sustainable in the higher-end marketplace where time and material overhead is extremely significant. 

In order to try to meet both of these objectives, I’ve grouped my work into two general silos. The first silo includes greeting cards, calendars, soft cover books, posters and open-edition 8x10 and 11x14 prints with clean, simple mats and affordable pre-fab metal frames. These works are designed to be accessible and affordable to all of our customers.

The merchandise (things like calendars, books, posters, etc. that are printed by a third party) makes the gallery very little money. Since we’re working in small print runs, the per-item cost is close to what you might be paying at retail for a mass-produced item. That’s why my calendar is $40 in a world where you can get a similarly-sized kittens calendar at Walmart for $16.99. Trust me, I’m trying to make it as affordable as possible. 

The 8x10 and 11x14 prints are a different story. We print these in-house, so we avoid much of the markup that comes with the merchandise ordered from third-party suppliers. Historically, I’ve tried to price these toward the higher end of the spectrum in order to benefit from the highest-margin offering I sell, and to make sure I’m keeping my photography positioned at the higher end of the market, as is necessary to make a sustainable living. Lately, however, I’ve realized that these are the exact places where I should be CUTTING prices. These are the pieces that I want to get into as many hands as possible. As such, I’ll be dropping the price of the mounted, matted 8x10 prints from $100 to $50, and the matted 11x14 prints from $250 to $125, a 50% reduction. Framing prices for these pieces has dropped as well.

And what about the other silo? We’re talking the limited edition prints with archival mounting and museum framing. Highly customized purchases that include in-person and virtual design consultation and curation as well as local delivery and installation. Well, those prices are going up. We set the current pricing when we opened the gallery based on 2023 realities. We were also working with unknown and uncertain numbers around what it would cost to open, run, staff and maintain a brick and mortar gallery, and to print, frame and launch new collections of work 4x per year. Now we’ve had 13 shows in the gallery. We’re entering our 4th year in this location. We have hard numbers on what it costs to operate this business in its current form. To make a long story short, it’s expensive, and only getting more so. As such, we’ll need to adjust prices of our high-end offerings to accurately reflect the cost of doing business. We hope that our clients will continue to support our efforts and purchase our artwork. We’ll keep working hard to make work that stands above the rest, while using our artwork, platform, and voice to help protect the very places that this artwork celebrates. 

If you love my work and the values behind it, and are ready to take something home today, the prices on our open edition prints are reduced by more than half, effective immediately.

If you’ve been considering a limited edition print from my collection now would be a great time to pull the trigger. We’ll be honoring the existing pricing from now through the opening of our next show on September 17th, at which point, new pricing will take effect.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who supports my work. I couldn’t do any of this without you.