Million Dollar Potato Photo

It never ends! What will the next big thing be???:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/27/arts/pota ... ion-euros/

http://petapixel.com/2016/01/21/this-ph ... r-1000000/

Joe

It needs to end...and will when people stop responding to, and promoting, foolishness. Posting links to such things is not helpful.

You'd have to be living in a bubble to not hear about it in mainstream news. It's always good to know there is still a sucker born every minute!

Joe

I have 10's of thousands of good images. I would be glad to print 3 24X48's for only $33,333.00 each. Thats's cheaper than the spud.

Larry

Joe, the old saying is true: "It's not what you know. It's who you know."

If you or I doodled on a restaurant napkin, it would be thrown in the busboy tray with the dirty dishes and glasses without so much as an afterthought.  Robert Crumb or Picasso draws on a napkin, the waiters and waitresses will be fighting over who gets to keep it because it can easily translate in thousands of dollars.  

PS.  But that is a well photographed potato

It doesn't hurt to be shamelessly good at self promotion, talk the right talk, schmooze with potential buyers, know your market etc etc. All aimed at convincing people it will be "collectible."

To get an idea how to do this wander into a Peter Lik gallery one day, he's trained people to talk the talk for him, they call them art consultants.

After reading the comments about this I am somewhat surprised of the negative take. I am aware that for many things, I have always seen a side that seems to go against the general consensus. In this case, that the sale of a photograph for one million dollars is bad for photographers, wrong, or should not have happened. I’m am totally supportive of personal opinions and am glad we all have one. Honestly I have no idea why anyone would be upset with something like this. What I do see is why other photographers who aspire to sell their work would be extremely intrigued.

From my point of view it is very clear that a potato had absolutely nothing to do with what a customer was willing to pay. Does anyone wonder why someone would pay such a price for a photograph? To do this, you must remove your opinion of the image being of a potato and think of it as a photograph that you have taken of whatever you enjoy photographing. Why would anyone buy one of “your” photographs? Why would someone pay $100 for one of your photographs? If they would, would they pay $1000 for one? If there is a limit in which a person would pay for your work, why is there? Do you want a limit? How do you increase this limit? These are just a few things I think of when something like this happens. It doesn’t even dawn on me to think of it disparagingly or in a negative way. It raises extreme curiosity. If you are able to see this in such a light you just may be able to progress your photography into areas you never thought possible.

The key to remember is, this has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with the photographer. There is nothing stopping anyone here from having the same type of success. But, and this but is key. You must understand that your photography should never be about any particular image. In the words of Dorthea Lange: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

I was not trying to be critical of what was paid for the photo by posting this, but rather amazed at what some people spend money on! E.G., Judge Judy being paid $47 million per year and she tapes just 52 days per year, or football players like Aaron Rodgers and Ben Roethlisberger:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Sheindlin

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2 ... ackup.aspx

But at least they earn money for others.

Here's more on a similar subject:

http://scottreither.com/blogwp/2012/06/ ... -my-story/

http://scottreither.com/blogwp/2013/02/ ... ore-savvy/

http://expertphotography.com/the-worlds ... -so-great/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... hotographs

Joe

SantaFeJoe wrote:I was not trying to be critical of what was paid for the photo by posting this, but rather amazed at what some people spend money on!
Joe

We worry about things like that, spending a lot of money, because we are not multi-millionaires or billionaires    The people who are will indulge their fancies in whatever pleases them.  If that means buying art that they have placed a value in, even if it seems expensive to us and it's expensive to them too but what's a million if you have a hundred million more? 

bradmangas wrote:After reading the comments about this I am somewhat surprised of the negative take. I am aware that for many things, I have always seen a side that seems to go against the general consensus. In this case, that the sale of a photograph for one million dollars is bad for photographers, wrong, or should not have happened. I’m am totally supportive of personal opinions and am glad we all have one. Honestly I have no idea why anyone would be upset with something like this. What I do see is why other photographers who aspire to sell their work would be extremely intrigued.

From my point of view it is very clear that a potato had absolutely nothing to do with what a customer was willing to pay. Does anyone wonder why someone would pay such a price for a photograph? To do this, you must remove your opinion of the image being of a potato and think of it as a photograph that you have taken of whatever you enjoy photographing. Why would anyone buy one of “your” photographs? Why would someone pay $100 for one of your photographs? If they would, would they pay $1000 for one? If there is a limit in which a person would pay for your work, why is there? Do you want a limit? How do you increase this limit? These are just a few things I think of when something like this happens. It doesn’t even dawn on me to think of it disparagingly or in a negative way. It raises extreme curiosity. If you are able to see this in such a light you just may be able to progress your photography into areas you never thought possible.

The key to remember is, this has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with the photographer. There is nothing stopping anyone here from having the same type of success. But, and this but is key. You must understand that your photography should never be about any particular image. In the words of Dorthea Lange: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

Brad here makes sense doesn't he??? You bet he does.....And this one example illustrates how we should all view things from the many possible views before we judge.....


Good one Brad....


The potato pic is junk.....any person with a umbrella light and a potato and a camera for the first day could capture that....   So what is the message??? What are the feelings that it evokes??? What changes does it inspire???
A good preliminary pic for a potato soup recipe....which by the way I love!!!!


Personally, I not only would have never taken it but also it would have found it's way to the file cabinet that looks like a waste can...


Obviously the rich guy for as shallow as he is bought the pic because he had a perceived value in mind based on the one and only "artist".
IOW's a pigeon is a flying rat until there is only one left and then it is sacred....Perceived value.....A sickness the world is suffering from..


Brad so makes this clear..very perceptive on his part.....


Pau

I found this article titled "What's Your Potato?"  I think it reflects a few other threads posted lately - you can read it in it's entirety here: http://davidduchemin.com/2016/01/whats-your-potato/

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Some of us will take umbrage with this and write articles -usually on Facebook where academic rigour and common sense resonate less than volume – about how photographers on Craigslist are undercutting us all and how we can’t photograph a wedding for what the market will pay because our gear, our studio, our insurance, and our time, cost so much money and how we need to feed our kids and take the cat to the vet and you know what? All those arguments are true.
But nobody cares.  Nor is it their business to care.

Your clients don’t care how much your gear cost. They don’t care what your bills are. They don’t care if you go bankrupt. Those things are not their concerns nor should they be. And it’s not the responsibility of the young photographer down the block doing sessions for $50 so she can cut her teeth on this craft, to plug the holes in your faulty, out of date, business model.

Your clients, if they are to be your clients, care about the things they care about. The default mode of photographers is to try to convince the market to care about things we think that market should care about. Our default mode is a defensive position. Instead we should be listening.
Why aren’t people paying you $10,000 for your wedding photography? There are probably two reasons. The first is that they don’t value photography the way you do. You’re trying to sell them a Rolex and they’re very happy with their Timex. The second is that you haven’t found something they value more than the $10,000 you’re asking them to part with. In short, you have no potato. Find out what they want. And then connect that, if there’s a connection to be had, with what you do well.

Earlier this month Vogue told readers that among the things a modern bride and groom can do without is a professional photographer. Photographers rushed to the ramparts with flaming arrows to defend the castle. And some of what got said in defence of vocational photography was the undeniable triple truth. But. The one question I don’t see photographers asking, because that article was a profound opportunity to better understand that market, is “what can we learn from this?” Or more to the point, “what does my market or potential market value, and how can I change what I do, and how I do it, to give them that value?” The first ones to re-jig their business based on the never-ending re-mixing of what we are good at and what others want, will win. The last ones out of the gate, because they’re too busy defending what “ought” to be, and what markets “should” value, will lose. They will lose the attention of their markets because they don’t listen to them. How could they? They’re too busy trying to sell them something they don’t want. The question for the open-minded should not be “how many ways is Vogue magazine wrong about this?” The question should be, “what if they’re right?”

Is a photograph of a potato worth a million dollars? That’s not for you or me to decide, ultimately. It’s for the buyer. But I guarantee the photographer, in this case it was Kevin Abosch, a photographer who also charges up to $500,000 to make headshot of people like Johnny Depp, didn’t make his case by telling the buyer how much his cameras cost, and looking nervously over his shoulders for a Craigslist photographer who has a photograph of a yam for sale for $50.

We should be inspired by Kevin Abosch, however absurd we consider his photograph. It should give us hope. It should light a fire under our ass. It should make us take stock. And it should make us ask long, hard questions about our audience and what they find valuable. But it’s easier to mock. It’s easier to huddle together and snicker. Much harder to, instead, go looking for your own potato. Much harder – because this wasn’t Abosch’s first potato photograph – to keep photographing that thing over and over and over until someone bites. It’s much harder to do the work. To study branding and marketing, to fail, and reinvent yourself when the market changes as it most certainly has over the last few years.

To be blunt, in the most loving, friendly way I can, because this sermon, like most of the sermons I preach, is first aimed at myself – the world owes us nothing. And as more and more talented photographers jump in the pool the laws of supply and demand will mean there’s more supply, less demand, and for the commodity that is most abundant, the value will drop. So we – you and I – sure as stuff better have something more than a mere commodity to offer. It’s hard as nails to make a living by charging for something others will gladly do for free.

What’s your potato? And who wants it? If you can’t get past the fact that it’s “just a photograph of a potato” then you understand exactly how much of the market feels about your work. About my work. And until you understand the value you offer, and understand that value is entirely in the eyes of the buyer, your only position will be a defensive one. The question is never “how much are these photographs, or my ability to make them, worth?” The question is always, always: “does my audience see value in what I make?” I will know the answer not by how loudly I proclaim my worth (and you must also believe in that), but by how much time, attention, and money, your market or audience, is willing to trade for it.