What Are Photographs Worth?

Below is a relic from one time when I sold photos as digital downloads,

I have been a photographer since I was fourteen when my father gave me his 35mm camera after he couldn’t figure out how to use it and that was over sixty years ago. I qualified as a photographer in the Navy but, unfortunately there were never any openings for that rating. While most of my college degrees are in technical photography and photographic engineering, I never stopped being a photographer. I have photos in several museum permanent collections and my photos have appeared in a number of major magazines like the iconic Life magazine.

After retiring my wife and I took up traveling as a serious avocation and in alomst a couple of dozen years we’ve had the good fortune to have visited more than 112 countries. Our photo collection numbers above 10,000 images with maybe a few dozen being pretty good if I say so myself. But that brings us to the question of the day; what is a photograph worth?

If I put a value on our photographs based on the cost of acquiring them they’ed be worth a small fortune, but we know that’s nowhere near realistic. Years ago I was often paid to take photographs, from weddings in the beginning to news assignments and advertising shots and I even sold images once in a gallery, but that was long ago.

For a while we sold photos through a web store and on Etsy but actually the orders weren’t worth the effort of keeping up with the the paper work and inquiries. Currently we do sell photos on assignment in shops in our small town and that has actually been the most successful venue.

In the current age of several billion photographers with cellphones and instant, made to order AI images it would seem that photos worth in traditional markets aren’t really worth much.