I have just spent some excess US$ in my PayPal account at LensWork: a one year magazine subscription, the On Being a Photographer book I wanted to read for a long time, and a print by Brooks Jensen.

I have been listening to his podcast for quite a while now, and while I don’t always agree, it makes some good listening and provides food for thought. In a previous podcast, he talked about his philosophy of selling his prints for US$20 each, which created some debates. After some digestion of the pros and cons, I tend to agree with him. Of course this works a lot better if you don’t need to make a living out of print sales, but it appears that his prime objective is getting his artistic vision out and, for him, that works best with this concept.

So I was curious what you would get for $20. It seems an incredibly low price for a print of such an experienced photographer and printer.

I haven’t said it publicly, but one of my goals I set myself at the beginning of this year is to sell one print of my photos (the others being getting more exercise and continue Japanese language studies — no progress so far on both counts). I don’t care about profit and loss, not for that single one anyway, all I want is to sell one print to someone at a reasonable price. I have to think about what is a reasonable price for myself. So I have been thinking about how to do this logistically. Who should print it and how? For starters, I don’t have a darkroom and to be honest I am not a great printer and have no time, so I am happy to pay others to do it for me. I haven’t made any progress on this so far, but I am looking forward to looking at Jensen’s print so see what is it that one is getting for that amount of money.