Last week the Times had an interesting article about 65 glass plate negatives purchased for $45 at a garage sale in Fresno. Suspecting that they might be far more valuable than $45, the purchaser then assembled a team of experts to prove that the negatives were recovered from the 1937 fire in Ansel Adams’ darkroom. Value, $200 million. Well it turns out the experts in this case may not have been that expert, the $200 million is a givaway of course. It is still being disputed so we will have to wait on that, but it may remind any of us from the film era of our own stories of lost negatives. We all have them, don’t we, lost negative stories. I have.

In the digital era the problem is slightly different but images can get lost and when that happens its feels like more of a loss than it is because the potential image is an incalculable thing. I don’t need to tell you to make backups and put the hard disk in a separate safe place but there are other ways to lose things in the digital world by simply misfiling them. I try to file everything when I download it but still manage to lose a few files along the way, although, so far I have not lost anything in the digital realm as thouroughly as I lost those lost negatives that I still think about to this day.

Photographer Andrew Moore featured in ArtNews

Any number of things might go through an artist’s mind in deciding what to charge for work. Give it away or charge a lot? Will a substantial price assert the significance of the work or drive buyers away?

Last week in New York I was reading ArtNews. On page 4 there is an advertisement for Heritage Auction Gallery showing an Annie Leibovitz 14″ x 14″ Cibachrome photographs of Robert Redford. The estimated price is $4,000 to $6.000. It’s number 4 of an edition of 50. The price seems about right for a not great photograph by Annie Leibovitz – and it is Robert Redford after all.

More interesting though is the article in the same issue about the photographer Andrew Moore who takes photographs mostly of urban scenes and collapsed buildings. His prints sell for between $7,000 and $25,000 at the Yancy Richardson Gallery, a terrific gallery in New York. Thats a nice price. An artist could live and breathe with those prices and even have an occasional meal out. Moore is a fine photographer and BAPC member work is as good or better.

New York itself lends a certain weight to work shown. Its in the air. I know that and it allows galleries to charge more. But, that said, we don’t charge enough for our work.