Brink Magazine 2nd Anniversary Party

In case anybody missed our lat Jazz Poetry Night, at Culture Club, we have already scheduled another for 21st April (at The Wanch 54 Jaffe rd Wanchai.), I hope many of you found time to pop into pop into Culture Club one evening and have a look at our The Brink Exhibition. There were superb paintings, sculptures and signed limited edition photographs there ranging in price from $1199HK up to $200,000HK so there was sure to be something there to suit your budget.  All of these artists have good pedigrees and there work will appreciate in value over the next few years. If you missed out please contact brinreplies@hushmail.com and find out what you missed out on some of the work didn't sell so there are baragain there to be had.

Some of you might wonder how a photograph can be an investment. This is how it works, firstly there's the costs of outputting taking the image. This involves time, travel, depreciation on expensive equipment. If the photographer is working digital he* probably needs a full frame digital SLR $17,000HK minimum (body only) and probably double that in terms of lenses, professional-level tripods, light meters filters, flashes and memory cards. If he's shooting on film it will be a professional film that costs $50HK per roll to but and $30HK per roll to process and he will probably shoot 36 frames to get 6 that are publication quality and 1 that he is satisfied to exhibit. On top of that the guy shooting film will be up for the costs of a top quality film scanner $40,000HK. Alternatively he else takes his stuff in to somebody with a drum scaner who chrages him $200 for a max resolution scan. Nevertheless some people still prefer film. Some time ago digital SLRS reached the resolution of a 200 ISO colour negative film. However this is still orders of magnitude below the resolution of professional slide films like E100, Provia 100 and Velvia. These slide films create images by chemical reactions in microscopic silver halide crystals set in layers each of which is sensitive of a different colour, the film is then developed by a normal back and white developer which is stopped with acetic acid. The image is then reversed to turn the negative image into a positive image. Then a colour developer is added and the a bleach removes unfixed colour dyes after fixing and stabilizing the image is ready to view or scan.

Remember the halide crystals in professional slide films are about 1/2 the size of those in the 200 ISO print film. Think about how many of those tiny halide crystals you can fit into the 24 x 36mm image area of a normal slide. Then remember that there are four layers of these crystals three colour layers and one back and white layer.  We can covert these subtle nuances to digital images with film scanners which run lasers through the slide to photomultiplier tubes on the opposite side which capture the information in digital form as the slide is soowly being mover over the laser. Drum scaners do a similar thing the slide is soaked in a special oil and stuck to the outside of an optically erfect polycarboate cylinder. The oil fills any scratches and suppresses any dust, creating an optically perfect fit. A laser penetrates the cylinder and bounces of the information on the slide. Because the laser light is coherent, each or the millions of light waves in the beam can capture separate feature of the original slide. The photomultiplier tubes are the only limitation to the resolution which is currently 12,000 pixels per inch. If top of the range lenses are used the final digital image from this process.

Only now are we getting full frame digital SLRS which can produce a digital image as good as the best drum scans from professional 35mm slide films. Cannon has  the Nikon has the D3S and Sony has the 24 megapixel, Alpha 900, for only $23,000. Canon has the 21 Megapixel EOS1DS mark III for $50,000K  and there's The NIKON D3x for $62,000HK. For a mere $300,000 the photographer going the whole hog digital wise may go up to what is called 'medum-format digital' and get a camera which captures 50 megapixels on a 40 x 50mm CCD providing he doesn't mind waiting one second between shots while the camera saves the file.

The photographer shooting film has another ace up his sleeve he can use medium format cameras to produce his original slide. These slides can be 6 x4.5 cm, 6 x 6cm, 6 x7cm or 6 x 9 images which encode much more information than can be found on the tiny 24 x36mm image (also called 35mm) that we are familiar with. If he's not afraid of cumbersome equipment the film photographer may even go the whole hog and shoot on large format film 4x 5 inches or 8 x10 inches. When these gigantic slides are drum scanned the sky is the limit as far as resolution is concerned. All of this stuff especially the digital gear depreciates quickly. On top of that you have the output cost of the image.

Most exhibition print making nowadays is digital one way or another but you can still get prints made using an old fashioned analog enlarger and photo paper at about $800 for a 16 x 20 inch direct print of a slide or a negative which can be razor sharp if done properly. Lets assume we take the digital route. 

The photographer (or perhaps a professional print maker hired by the photographer) adjusts the colours then makes a small test print of one section of the image checks it for colour, contrast and saturation. If it's not right, he goes back to the computer (or sometimes even today, the dark room) and does some more adjustment until he gets it right. Then the full size print takes about a half an our to output.  So by this time just the printing and adjustment has involved at least 2 hours work on an expensive set of equipment. There are two ways to do this one way is to use a very expensive machine which uses lasers to write the image onto traditional photopaper which is the developed and dried. The other way is to use an ink-jet printer which spits tiny dots of ink onto a piece of paper which is specially treated to receive it both processes have their pros and cons. The photo paper costs more but you don't need ink.

The inkjet alows you to use a wide range of papers with different textures and gives you more vibrant colours however it generally doesn't archive as well (there are a few exceptions to this and fixatives get better every year). However both types of paper will keep their colour quite well if sealed in an airtight frame.

Sadly all colour will fade in time (that goes for paintings as wel). For this reason black and white prints have traditionally had a higher value for collectors although some colour papers such as Fuji Cristal Archive and Cibachrome had been known to hold their colour very well over periods exceeding 20 years.

As we've seen turning out an exhibition quality prints is no quite the cookie cutter process people imagine. Ad that to the fact that exhibition prints should always be hand singed and numbered eg. Joe Wong 1/5 2008. This means that Joe Wong made the print in 2008 and that this is the first print in a series of five. In other words Joe undertakes not to make more than 5 such prints. Once the series of 5 is sold he will not make any more prints in that size. If you want another prints of that image you're going to have to buy a bigger one, of which he may only make a series of 2.  This concept hasn't really sunk in East Asia and so you can get signed limited edition prints by well known photographer here for as little as $1000. Compare that with Australia or Europe or New York where photography is sold as ART and you'll realize that you can start a collection of work from good photographers for  tiny fraction of  what you would have to put up to start similarly broad a collection of paintings. The potential appreciation on a photo can be massive.

Here's a homework assignment for you go an look for prices of photographs by

Ansel Adams, $US21,250

Cindy Sherman $US2.1million

Sebastiao Salgado $US18,000

Dianne Arbus $US32,000

Henri Cartier Bresson $US21,600  

An you don't have to wait for the photograher to die in order for the work to become valuable. Cindy Sherman and Sebastiao Salgado are alive and well.

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Mark