Over the years, collecting photography has transformed from a hobby (think postcards and 19th century commercial portraiture) into serious business. Photographic art, sold in galleries, is a phenomenon of the last 100 years, though the market has transformed over the past 30 years into a multi-million dollar industry at the leading edge of contemporary art.

From the beginning of photography, there have been three divergent approaches to the photograph represented by the one-off Daguerreotype, limited-edition lithographs, and William Henry Fox Talbot’s proto-negative. In the field of acquiring and collecting photographs, the market has focused its attention to one facet or the other: Do you favor a unique one-of-a-kind object, or one that is essentially part of a crowd (limited or open-ended) of identical siblings? The former, similar to a painting, has a finite market. The latter is in line with photography’s democratic character.

The Daguerreotype was a one-of-a-kind object, a literal, highly-polished mirror of reality. One might reasonably compare this quality to that of the Polaroid instant print technology (despite the Daguerreotype being anything but instant in its execution). The result of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s process was a unique object. Like a painting, there’s an edition of one. The object is the photograph (or vice versa).

Producing photographs in strictly limited quantities (in fashion of lithographs, engravings, woodcuts, etc) has emerged in concert with the emergent photography marketplace. These limited editions are imposed artificially in order to increase the value of a photograph through scarcity. However, traditionally in printmaking, the limit on edition size was practical: a plate degrades through use, putting an upper limit on the number of images to be struck.

In contrast, William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered paper negatives that allowed for infinite reproduction. This negative, in which bright objects have been transformed into darkened masses, becomes the matrix for prints. The same light sensitive material could be pressed against the source, the exposure repeated, and dark areas are returned to their original brightness. By extension, Talbot’s photography anticipated all manner of prints that could be produced in multiples and broadly disseminated. This democracy of the photograph is at the heart of Charcoal Editions.

We believe all three approaches to the photograph are important and necessary, however the open-edition model has largely disappeared today. For much of the twentieth century, photographers didn’t issue limited-edition prints. Editioning became prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, when galleries and collectors began to question the number of prints a photographer had available, desiring a finite market for their collections.

At Charcoal, we favor open-ended editions. And because we believe that at photography’s core is the production of works with light, not ink, we want the essential beauty of the gelatin silver print to be accessible to collectors at all levels. Our work with master printer Sergio Purtell ensures customers of the highest possible quality photographic prints, while the purchase price reflects an equitable division of compensation between gallery, printer, and artist.