On visual economics and scarcity

No longer special if you see it every day, but stands out precisely because you don’t.

Alternative title: why exceptional photographs will always be rare

Economics 101: value, regardless of how it’s measured (price, time, social media kudos, etc) is proportional to demand. Demand is regulated by intrinsic attractiveness to a given market, the size of that market, and the supply available. Regardless of how few of something there are, if nobody likes or wants it, then it has no value. Similarly, something that may be intrinsically cheap but in short supply with a huge demand might see its price rise out of proportion with the the actual cost, utility or materials of the goods in question. But it’s not just physical goods that obey this rule; intellectual property and even more nebulous intangibles that do not have a limited supply (e.g. there is no theoretical limit to the number of people who can view a photograph) do, too. Even the compositional elements of a photograph. If you’re ready for another one of my strange philosophies, read on.

Let’s examine premise 101 as a case study. In the early days of this site, the content had no value because there was no demand and no publicity. I put out many reviews and articles at a frantic pace to build a catalog and establish bona fides, and then hoped people would come if I wrote about the right things – which mostly worked. Now, every time a camera is released I get an avalanche of emails asking me to review it; it’s up to me (the supplier) to decide if there’s value in me doing so (inevitably, there isn’t, since there’s no way to get back the cost of the camera, the time spent testing and writing, and then replying comments and emails). The upshot is that the few reviews I do write see disproportionate traffic spikes: ergo, demand rises with scarcity, rule 101 obeyed. We now touch on the unlimited supply topic, too: even though I review few cameras, there’s no limit to how many people can read the reviews, nor how many times and individual can read them. That increase in supply does not affect the intrinsic value of the thing in question (the review); if anything, the opposite: internet pages with more traffic have higher perceived credibility (value) than ones that don’t.

However, value can tip in the opposite direction, too: the more content I output, the more it’s expected or taken for granted that the supply continues. Every time I’ve changed post frequency in the past (daily, to alternate days, to now once every three days) I’ve had again a flurry of emails asking me why I’m not writing, and where are the articles? Yet if I’d charged a toll to read – I think the audience would probably disappear. This puts digital content in the strange no-mans-land of having demand, but no value. I don’t think I need to explain why this makes for poor business economics, and the race to the bottom of the content-generating internet in general: if this is your primary business, you have to monetise through advertising, sponsorships, referral fees, and whatever else you can, which inevitably compromises the content, which in turn loses the audience. A precarious balance, this one.

Case study number two: in my watch business, if we label something as a ‘limited edition’, seemingly regardless of how many are produced, there’s an irrational rush and desire to own one – even though the reality is that as a small brand, our total production can simply never be that high; even less than the ‘very limited’ models of much larger brands. Yet even within our own brand, at the same price points, limited editions sell much better than non-limited, even if there are fewer of the non-limited. And once again: if you make everything limited, then nothing is really limited and the whole concept loses value. I think it’s fundamental psychology: we want what we can’t have; the harder it is to get, the more we want it, and the greater the extents we are willing to go to get it.

But here’s another nature of demand and human psychology: it’s like quantum mechanics. Try to measure/ capitalise on it, and the actual quantisation changes. Theoretical demand for something at $100 isn’t the same as the actual number of sales for an identical real product at $100: it’s perhaps 10%, if that. Theoretical commitment has no impact cost and is easy to acclimatise to; the more expensive, the more unpredictable the reaction – in other words, the further we get to the edge of the curve*, the more irrational people get. Extreme example: if you base a business around selling a single, specialised $2bn camera, you’ll likely go bankrupt; or, if your client is NASA, they might buy two, and you’ll retire a rich man. I’ve seen and experienced this personally both ways – often success or failure of a venture can be traced down to a single event that happened, or didn’t happen. Business is every bit as much as a risk as gambling.

*Or, unpredictable region/ non-linear regime/ illogical behaviour; take your pick.

Push-pull tension of price and demand…

I mentioned acclimating to an idea before: no matter how extreme, we eventually get used to it and move on as if normal and taken for granted. Take the internet, for example, or even smartphones. Hell, digital cameras and electric cars. There are countless examples of crazy things becoming accepted and commonplace; to get attention the bar has moved and the ‘next best thing’ must be even more extreme. This is also true of compositions and photography: here we switch gears to the intangible. In a presentation of uniformly exceptional photographs – each of which on its own would stand head and shoulders above its average peers of similar subject matter – the one that stands out is going to be the one that breaks pattern, and is in itself relatively exceptional: the crappy mediocre one. You’re going to remember the one that is different. In this way, the bar is continually moving: what passed for an exceptional photograph in the 1960s or 1970s is no longer exceptional today, and would be forgotten without historical provenance and context. What passes as exceptional today won’t be tomorrow, and so on: it’s the difference in perspective and viewpoint that we need to find and present in order to stand out visually.

If everything was made of gold, gold would have no value. If you ate nothing but caviar at every meal, instant noodles would suddenly start to be rather appealing. I think you see the point.

This is one of the reasons curation is so critical for overall impact: images in a series must be different enough from each other and presented in such a way that these differences help each individual image to stand out. Anything that’s repetitive should be excluded, because it not only reduces impact for itself but also other similar images; one must have more impact than the other; one must be a better fit for the rest of the presentation than the other. There is no point showing a bunch of images so similar they get lost amongst themselves.

Even within a single image or composition, too many elements mean that single elements don’t stand out. Too many of the same element turn that into a single visual element in and of itself, drawing attention to anything that is not the same. Even if we’re talking about exceptional subjects – for argument’s sake, let’s say a single person in an otherwise massively empty desert – the moment you add a handful of random people all over the landscape, the human element ceases to be the focal point of the composition. We are back at curation again: this time, consciously excluding the bits that you don’t want to be visible and interpreted. Scarcity and economics apply in visual composition – who’d have known?

I said before that intellectual property like photographs, web articles and the like have value independent of quantity in the market; that’s not quite true. Though there is no degradation of value of a single instance of viewing if more people see an image – if anything, social network effects that actually increase value (“yeah, I saw it too! I’m part of the in crowd!”; more views of advertising = higher expected sales conversions) – it’s the very difficulty in linking value with quantity that limits the perception of photography’s value as an art form. An oil painting exists in a single instance; assuming it does not get damaged in the process, hundreds of millions of people can see the Mona Lisa without diminishing its value. But if there was more than one identical copy, value would be far lower than half. It’s the possibility for making identical copies that photography has to get over; there’s no easy way to do this beyond trusting the integrity of the artist and their promise to limit editions. And then there’s the separation of print (physical object, can be made unique) to digital file (intangible object, infinite perfect copies can be made) – I’d rather not get started on the whole blockchain thing, thank you. Instead, I’m going to come full circle by saying less, and only presenting two images in this essay: value in photography (and intellectual property) is proportional to personal relevance, credibility and integrity: fortunately, those things are all priceless and without price at the same time. MT

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