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Selling Art Photography
What To Do When You Think Your Work Is Sellable

As a photographer, I think there can be many types of images we capture but not all of them would be destined to sell or even worthy of selling. I have had 6 galleries so far in my life and have found that in general it is very hard to sell straight up photography. Well... not that it's hard to sell, but rather the art buying crowd for photography is not as large as the crowd that buys other types of Wall Art or 3 Dimensional Art. And there are those that don't even consider photography as wall art.

There are also different segments of buyer types that buy certain genres of photographic art. For example in the Rossini Festival, I only seem to sell scenes from Europe or of Knoxville and none of my Smoky Mountain or Art of Autos pieces are even picked up off the rack for closer observation. But in Cliff Dwellers Gallery in Gatlinburg, I mostly only sell Smoky Mountain Scenes.

There are many avenues you can take to sell your photographic art, but keep in mind the two main routes you can take. If you have a gallery sell it for you then you will pay them 40-50 percent of the revenue of your sales. Yet if you do art festivals you will keep all the revenue for yourself but you will pay a fee to rent the booth space which on average is $150 and up depending on the venue and number of days of the show. In any method you choose, besides the cost of making the prints there will be some cost involved, as for selling photographic art is not %100 profit.

I have had my own gallery, have work in galleries and participate in Art Festivals plus have an Online Gallery that produces a sale every now and then. Another aspect you will have to consider is how you plan to price your work, whether it be priced to where you may sell one $300 print in a show or you would rather sell ten $30 prints. My personal preference is to sell at the lower price point so you don't stand around all day waiting on that one big sale. I personally like running a credit card every few minutes all day long rather then sitting on pride and trying to get that one big sale accomplished. But I do have many fellow photo artisans that would rather sell those $300 prints and be happy they sold two or three prints in a day.

I also look at photography more as a product and not have so much emotional and sentimental value involved. For example the piece shown here titled "Rocky Top" has been printed 84 times ranging in sizes from 5x7 through 20x30. I have brought in $4593 from those sales, while a good portion of it has been gallery sales, I am still quite happy with the profit I have gotten from this image that I maybe spent 10 minutes shooting and possibly a couple hours in Photoshop.

Not every piece I have ever captured and printed have gone this viral but quite a few have seen 20 printings or more. Some thought needs to be put into your strategy of pricing so that you don't become discourage after sitting in your booth all day and sell maybe two or three high dollar prints. Even though the revenue may be the same, I personally prefer being active all day and seeing multiple prints go to new owners.

To the best I can tell from my accounting from owning my own gallery for 12 years and sales from shows and other outlets, I have sold between three to four thousand prints. Yet it's somewhat funny to me that when I first developed that roll of film in 1972, I never even fantasized about selling my works.

In The Beginning
When I developed my first roll of 620 film from the family's Brownie camera in 1972, I never really had the idea of selling photos in mind. I was simply thrilled at the process and the craft of capturing and printing photographs. Within a few weeks of developing that roll in the bathroom of the house, I managed to do some work for a neighbor and earned enough money to purchase several 2x4’s and a few sheets of 4x8 paneling to build a 6x8 feet darkroom in the garage.

As time went by, I upgraded from the Brownie to a 126 Instamatic and eventually a 35mm SLR. I would spend every possible hour I could developing and printing, using the funds I earned as a newspaper carrier to buy film, processing chemicals and photo paper. Even in 1980 when I added a color room to the darkroom which doubled it’s size, I still didn’t have selling in mind, I was just extremely passionate about the hobby.

In 1980 I got a job working for a studio traveling to small towns and setting up for the day in a department store photographing mostly children that parents would bring in for the Free 8x10 the studio offered. In a way, I was actually selling my photography but didn’t really look at it that way. All I knew was that I was making tons of money to party on and to buy darkroom supplies. Since printing color was a lot more expensive than black & white, I could afford the luxurious Cibachrome printing paper and E6 chemistry to process the slide film I was shooting.

So even though I had sold photographs I had captured, they were not "Art Photos" so I didn't feel the satisfaction that someone bought it because it was a pretty scene... they had bought my work because it was a photo of their child I had taken in the traveling studio.

When I was 24, I got my dream job of working in the camera department of the largest photo supplier in town. This led to the opportunity to display some of my prints along the top shelf in the department. All the local photographers and photography students from the college would hang out and shop there.

Due to my employment there, I was able to buy anything at a very good discounted price. It seemed like I was trying out a different camera or lens every few days and sometimes managed to capture an image I felt was print worthy. My darkroom had grown to three enlargers plus color developing and printing capabilities.

Although I may have shot some friends weddings and possibly was even paid, I didn't see that as selling Art Photography either. I also gave away as many art pieces as I could just to get them out there on peoples walls.

A Gallery Is Born
In 1982 I partnered with a fellow friend & camera enthusiast to open a camera store, studio, public darkroom, gallery and school. Named The Image Factory, I had a darkroom to rent to the college students, had acquired a Kodak Dealership to have film and supplies to sell them, a studio to shoot portraits, conducted basic photography classes and had a very nice sitting room filled with 16x20 prints of mine. It was like a photographers hang out.

As you can see from the my sample images from the 80's I was producing, it's a good thing I didn't try to sell them as for I would have been quite disappointed. Although at the time, I was quite happy with the work, since I shot it, processed it and then printed it. The craft of photography then wasn't just shoot it and then look at it on the computer.

Thinking back on it, I’m not sure if I sold any prints from that first gallery of mine but the atmosphere was rewarding enough, and the goal and desire to sell my works was finally there. I can barely even recall any images I had hanging up, but I remember most were 16x20 Black & White's I had printed in the darkroom and a few Cibachrome prints I printed as well.

In fall of 1983, I found myself moving to Charlotte, North Carolina and went through a dark period of photography for me where I actually did not’t shoot for about five years. I even sold one of the three cameras I still owned and a lot of dust gathered on the two I had left. It wasn’t until I called an old high school buddy and he asked me if I still carried a camera everywhere I went.

That conversation sparked a light in my photography life and I dusted off my Nikon FE and began shooting again. Unfortunately about the only thing I can remember shooting during my years in Charlotte was some commercial product shots I captured with a Mamiya 645.

When I moved to Florida in 1996, my first job was operation of the Black & White darkroom at a One Hour Photo lab but I still wasn't really shooting anything. It wasn't until 2000 when I became Art Director of Shutterbug Magazine that I really got full swing back into my photography. And even though I shot several covers and images made testing cameras for a few articles I wrote, I still wasn't actually selling Art Photography.

Art Festivals & Galleries
I was elected President of the Melbourne Camera Club and often gave presentations on different aspects of photography and inspiring fellow camera enthusiast to push the envelope further. We had monthly competitions and for an upcoming city art festival several of us went in on a booth to try and sell our works. I guess finally the time had come that I would officially try out the Art Photography Market.

There was enough space for each of the booth participants to display 4 pieces. One of the pieces I chose to show was "Peace In The Pews" (shown in the first pop up window at beginning of this project) and was warned that "religious" stuff doesn't sell. When the two day event was all said and done, our booth had sold only 1 print, which also happened to be my "Peace In The Pews" framed 11x14 print.

The fire was finally lit and my desire to see more of my works adorn the walls of other peoples homes and businesses was burning. I decided that the next time i do an art festival, I will just get a booth on my own, which is what I did the following year.

At that show I sold about twenty pieces and was quite excited at the idea that people liked my work enough to buy it and display it.

After I left my job at Shutterbug to open a Gallery in Cocoa Village which later would be known to me as Gallery 1 even though my first official gallery was The Image Factory back in 1982. I then went on to open Gallery 2 when I moved to Galinburg as well as 3,4 and 5. (not all at the same time)

I remember from the Grand Opening Party at Gallery 5, that a fellow artisan from Knoxville said that he would love to have his own gallery. Since I knew he only had a handful of finished pieces, my reply was that you need a lot of inventory to have a gallery. You have to have enough from all your genres to cover the wide range of buyers that may wander in. In fact even to do an art show or festival you will need a decent supply of inventory on hand. As you can see in the pic of my Art Show Booths, that I would have sometimes up to 350 pieces on hand. And as it turns out during the Charlotte 2 day show, I ended up selling works from every genre I had brought with me.

Another great venue for me has been one man shows such as a month long exhibition at a vape lounge in Bristol, Virginia. You will also see increased sales the days you are present at an event, for example i sold over $1000 on opening night alone due to the fact I was there to share the stories behind the works. I have sold many works to patrons after they have heard a story behind or associated with a print I have hanging. In Gallery 3 once, I was telling a gallery patron about a print with a grave yard in it and then he asked to see it... and then he left the gallery with it.

If you are feeling the urge to dive into the Photographic Arts Market, just be prepared for both times of discouragement from no sales to times of joy when you are so busy running credit cards that you don't even have time to eat lunch.

Good Luck, and make sure if you seek advice from fellow photographers, that they don't directly compete in the same shows or type of works you do. Trust me on this... as I was told before I moved into Gallery 3 by another photographer gallery owner in the same complex that I wouldn't sell anything there, turns out it was the most profitable gallery I every had and moved the most pieces out the door.