A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. But How Many Pounds?

The most expensive photo ever bought was Rhein II, by Andreas Gursky, which sold at a Christie’s auction in 2011 for over $4,000,000. This depicts a digitally altered (removing distractions) scene showing sky, river, and land. The price is based on it being shot by a world renowned photographer, and the rarity of the print (6 in total, and only 1 at this larger size).

Last week I got undercut on the quote for an Architecture photography job. This person valued their photos at ￡18 per photo. Now I’m not saying that their photo was worth as much as a Gursky (183,333 x the price of this photographer), but it must be worth more. The ￡18 photo is all the more bitter as that cost is being shared between 3 companies. One of these companies had a turnover of ￡50,000,000 in 2020. But to each of them, the photos are worth ￡6 each. The cost of a London pint.

Why Photographs?

Ultimately, most people employ an Architectural photographer as a means of marketing their business. It’s a method of displaying your years of training, your skill, your aesthetic, and the months or years you’ve spent designing, drawing, reviewing, submitting, explaining, revising, detailing this particular project. And depending on the size of project, and client, probably somewhere between half a million, and a billion pounds has been spent on it in total. So it stands to reason that it’s worth people seeing the investment and skill of a large team that’s gone into making it happen.

The perfect client, with a bottomless budget, great tradesmen and the most skilled Architect could work on a building; but if no-one sees it, is it worth it? To the client or resident, of course it is! But a happy anonymous client won’t win any design awards, nor get featured in magazines, journals, online articles, and won’t drive (many) new people to your website.

In absence of people being able to visit and experience the building (such as with public buildings), the only way for people to get a tangible impression of it is through images, either still or moving. These can be used either alone, or with spoken or written word, sometimes with process photos showing fabrication of items, or with the building in use, injecting life into the building.

But who will see the photos!?

Well. That’s partly down to you or your marketing/ comms person. But let’s picture a small-medium practice, who’s (like me) getting to grips with marketing. You get some photos done of your finished project. You put them on your website, which gets an average of 10 views a day. And you put them up on your Instagram, on which you share that project annually. Let’s project over 20 years, which seems a fair time to keep projects up.

Website views:

365 days x 10 views per day x 20 years = 73,000 views

Instagram views:

2000 followers x sharing once per year x 20 years = 40,000 views.

This means that conservatively, these photos of your work will be seen over 100,000 times (more if you’re savvy with this kind of thing. If you value each of those impressions of your photos at 1p per view, that comes to ￡1000. If you want to spend more time sharing these, or hope for more people to see them, or perhaps have a proper marketing/ advertising budget, it might be worth investing more in the initial product; more photos, or video, or document its construction or how it’s been used 5 years after completion.

ROI. Return on Investment.

If the quality of your media (and the quality of your work of course) we calculated above leads 1 person out of those 100,000 (0.00001%) to ask you for work, or recommends you to someone else, that investment is probably worth in the region of 100x what you paid for it. Which makes it seem a pretty sensible decision in the long run. If I can put in ￡1 and get ￡100 back, I’d be doing OK (and would have probably lost less change investing in crytptocurrency….).

The worth of work is married to the individual. The Gursky print isn’t worth over ￡3M to me. A one-man practice, who possibly scraped a profit from his first job doesn’t attach the same worth to photos that the Foster and Partners’ of this world does. F&P will have a huge turnover, want their work to be seen in the best light (literally), by as many people as possible. So to them, photography and media might be worth ￡10,000, because they know it’ll be seen by millions of people, and will bolster their profile and may help gain them the next commission.

But I can Take some pretty good photos myself….

It is very true that phone cameras produce amazing results in 2022. Some of the photos I share on my Instagram account receive comments from other photographers, shocked that it came out of a phone. And it’s also very true that the best camera you have is the one you have with you. But the professional tools help. As does years of practice. I’ve only just moved to do photography full time myself. But I began my photography journey at exactly the same time as my Architecture one (we needed a camera for trips and site visits in first year). So I’ve been using one, increasingly so, for 15 years. As with all roles where you’re paying for people’s time, you’re paying for their practice and skill, not their day.

There’s a famous, (possibly falsely attributed, but I’ll stick with the artist I heard) tale:

A woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”

“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.

“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

No-one truly knows the intricacies and overheads of jobs without having done them. Which is precisely what many Architects will have experienced in their own field, both for private clients and when submitting fee estimates to commercial clients. You know first hand that the client saving a few quid here and there, often either ends up with worse results, or more hassle somewhere down the line. And so it goes with photography. The more skilled, the more reliable, the more experience, and many other factors, the better the results and the better the relationship with your photographer, meaning you can concentrate on other parts of your business.

Summary.

So what’s the answer? I can’t provide a figure, and if you’ve read this far, you probably realise it’s impossible to do so. But below are some bullet point guidance notes:

• Do your research, see their portfolio, and realise that each project will be better than the last as they learn and develop.
• Be willing to pay for what the photos are worth for you.
• Be willing to be fair to the person who’s working for you; that spirit will come right back to you.
• Realise that much more goes into photography and film than you see.
• Use the photos you get as wisely as you can. They form part of your company’s presence.
• If you get quoted ￡3M for a job, send Mr. Gursky my way, I’d love a chat over a beer. He can buy.