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Welcome to Luke Powell Photographs
Sales Area
There are four kinds of photographs available for purchase: dye transfer prints, inkjet prints, notecards, and posters. The dye transfers are expensive and few images are available. An inkjet print with an image 51 cm or 20 inches on the long side is $250 US; other sizes are available. One poster with the image Light and Water is available for $30 including shipping anywhere. More details below:
Inkjet Prints:
From late 2004 I have been making prints with my own inkjet printer. I am using an Epson 7600 machine with Ultrachrome inks, which at this time seem to offer the best balance between color gamit and archival stability. My originals are almost all color slides, and once scanned the image files often take hours of cleaning with Photoshop before they can be printed. Many images are have been printed or cleaned already, but if you order a print of an image that has not been done before, it may take a little time.
This is the price schedule for various sizes of inkjet prints.
On Paper:
size, inches cm paper size USA$
14x9.33 (35.6x23.7 cm) 17x12 (43.2x30.5 cm) $125
20x13.33 (50.8x33.9 cm) 24x18 (61x45.7 cm) $250
30x20 (76.2x50.8 cm) 34x24 (86.4x61 cm) $500
48x32 (121.9x81.3 cm) 53x38 (134.6x96.5 cm) $1250
58.5x39 (144.8x96.5 cm) 63x44 (160x111.8 cm) $1750
On Canvas, to be mounted on stretchers like an oil painting:
size, inches cm canvas size USA$
28.5x19 (76.2x50.8 cm) 34x24 (86.4x61 cm) $550
48x32 (121.9x81.3 cm) 53x44 (134.6x96.5 cm) $1500
57x38 (144.8x96.5 cm) 63x44 (160x111.8 cm) $2000
You will be charged only the actual cost for shipping. Ordinarily the postal service is used, but it is possible to send the work by a courier that connects to FedEx. I have had terrible experiences with United Parcel Service, and I prefer not to use them at all. Private checks or money orders are preferred as payment, since the banks now charge too much for me to take credit card payments.
Anything ordered can be returned if you are not satisfied.
Notecards:
In the 1990s I printed twenty-eight different notecards, standard museum quality, folded notecards, 5x7 inches. For many years I had offered one or two cards along with the rental of The Afghan Folio exhibition, and these had sold very well. Under pressure to increase my income I invested in a large print run of cards with many different subjects: Afghanistan 9, Iran 1, Ladakh 4, Ceylon, Palestine 4, Egypt 5, Paris 5. We offered these for sale in attractive brown paper gift boxes, and people who saw the cards always regarded them as of very high quality, which indeed they were. At the time the Stinehour Press was one of the best printers in New England, and the paper and envelopes were the best available.
Today I still have some of the notecards available. Boxes of a dozen mixed cards with envelopes: $20 including shipping. Boxes of 26 different cards with envelopes: $32 including shipping. I have cases of collated sets of 26 cards, a few cases of boxed dozens. I also have cases of the cards from Ladakh, at least 1500 cards for each of the Ladakh and Zanscar images, and I have significant numbers of the cards from Palestine. Please talk with me if you are interested in purchasing these cards in bulk. I am moving soon and I need to get rid of these.
During the coming months I hope to fill your orders for pictures, but I will be moving in the coming weeks, and my life is in chaos at the moment. If I am out of touch for a time, please bear with me.
Posters:
I have one poster available. It has the image Light and Water (http://avalon.unomaha.edu/afghan/afghanistan/A1.HTM). There is a text below the image that says Luke Powell - The Afghan Folio, Color Photographs, Dye Transfer Prints. The poster is 28x19 inches (72x48 cm). The price is $25 US in North America, $30 anywhere else, including tube and shipping.
Dye Transfer Prints:
I was a dye transfer printer for many years. This was the top of the line Kodak color process for nearly half a century. Because most prints made by other processes faded so quickly, some museums would only acquisition color photographs if they were dye transfer prints or Cibachromes. Dye transfer was a very difficult, time consuming and costly process, but it was the only way to make many necessary adjustments and the only process that could produce a blemish-free print that would last for generations. Kodak had one of my images in their dye transfer brochure as the example of dye transfer used by an artist-photographer.
By the early 1990s it was clear that the digital revolution would soon replace film and analogue photo print technologies, and those who made dye transfer prints for a living pressed Eastman Kodak to tell them when the process was to be discontinued, with enough advance notice for users to purchase stocks that would allow them to continue for many years. When the time came, Kodak stopped producing dye transfer materials but kept telling customers not to worry, that they would give them five years notice. By the time word got out that production had stopped, stocks of dye transfer materials were already very limited, so the process went down much more abruptly than was necessary. Many artists were beginning to use the process at that point, and had dye transfer's demise been properly handled, many printers would have been put to work, and many a portfolio would have been made.
A few years later I was host for the last international gathering of dye transfer printers. Frank McLaughlin, the long-time head of customer relations for dye transfer was fired by Kodak some years before the end. He came to the gathering in an ambulance with oxygen and a wife and son to help him. Dye transfer was an odd, small fraternity of high-end professional photo printers; there were only a few artist photographers among them. The dye transfer process was mostly used for high-quality advertising copy, few individual artists were ever able to do it, but some did, and those few remain relatively unknown. Art history has been very slow to recognize color photography as a major means of artistic expression, so this is surely an area where collectors with both taste and technical understanding can have a field day at the present time. Most art historians were humanities majors; the technical demands of understanding color reproduction and the reluctance of museums to catalogue fugitive works have left color photography as virgin territory for scholars.
I sell dye transfer prints dry mounted on non-buffered acid free museum board with a cover mat. They are signed and numbered on both the print itself and on the mat. The Afghan Folio chapter on my web site is the set that I printed in dye transfer, on 11x14 inch paper with a frame size of 16x20 inches. These sell for $525, in most cases. Several images are sold out, and for some of the more popular images I charge more. Five of the Afghan images were done on 16x20 inch paper (Pines at Herat, The Kunduz Valley, The Steppes, Lavender Flowers Near Maimana, and The Lone Rider), frame size 20x26 inches; they sell for $925. Lavender Flowers Near Maimana is my best known image and prints of it now sell for considerably more. There are few copies left.
Twelve matched sets of the entire thirty-two print set The Afghan Folio were made. One set of these was sold to Jean-Marc Payot, in Lausanne, Switzerland, but he broke the set up, gave prints to different people. One set is a part of the collection of the late Prince Sadruddin Agha Khan, also in Switzerland, one is owned by the Center For Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nevraska at Omaha, and one hangs in Walter's Restaurant in Claremont, California. In 1989 twenty-two different museums and galleries held exhibits of The Afghan Folio in a single year, and there were a dozen or more shows each year for over a decade. These exhibits have almost stopped now, since the United States invaded Afghanistan. There were no public exhibits 2006... one in 2007. One exhibition is on the schedule in 2008, in late February and early March at the International Student Center at NYU.
The value of dye transfer prints has been rising ever since the materials for this extraordinary process were discontinued in the mid 1990s, and The Afghan Folio was one of the largest sets of prints ever made with the process, though NASA did have hundreds of prints made in dye transfer of the voyages to the moon. Ordinarily an exhibition by an American photographer may contain one or two dye transfer prints, but almost never does one see an entire exhibition of them. The Afghan Folio has been shown at one hundred twenty museums and galleries. Although a set of beautiful images of this wild and tribal land is not politically correct at the present time, and musuems are no longer requesting exhibitioins as they did when the Afghans were fighting the Russians, it is clear that in the future this exhibition set will be quite valuable. At $18,000 this entire exhibition set is indeed an investment opportunity.
After I printed the Afghan photographs I began working on a set called Paris in Winter, also done on 11x14 inch paper. With this work I began to experiment with ways to increase contrast in the image shadows. The photographs show a Paris without cars, and most of the images were taken in the heart of the city around The Louvre, Pont Neuf, and Palais Royale, and in famous parks. There are only fourteen prints in this series. A complete set of the Paris prints is $6000.
All of the images in the Landscapes exhibition were printed on 16x20 inch paper; these the are the photographs on the web site from Ladakh, Ceylon, Palestine, and Egypt. They are all priced at $925 each, except for Cloud Shadows, Olive Trees at Yanun, Tea with Clouds, and Blue Nile. They are more. The price will depend upon how badly I need the money at the time. All of the dye transfer prints were done in very limited numbers, but this is especially the case with this group of images. Most of them are marked 15/100 or whatever number, but I never printed more than sixty of any of them, and for most images no more than two dozen were ever made.
The Landscapes exhibition contains eight prints each from Ladakh, Ceylon, Palestine, and Egypt. No doubt because of the Palestine chapter, very few museums or galleries have even considered showing this entire exhibition, which is a shame since it is more mature work. My ability to use the dye transfer process reached its peak with this show, and it was the last work that I did with dye transfer before the process was discontinued. Because the show has never been often shown, few people have ever seen it or purchased the prints, so I made very few copies of many of the photographs. A complete set of eight prints from one of the countries involved costs $6000; a complete set of all thirty-two prints is $20,000.
It would be best for an interested collector to come here to Liverpool, Nova Scotia for a visit. Every dye transfer print was unique, so you really do need to see them. And, you are not likely to see my work exhibited any time soon. I moved out of America in early 2004 with all of my work, and my exhibits have nearly stopped. I may well have had more one-man shows than any other photographer of my generation in North American museums, but my affection for the world of Islam makes me a pariah now, especially in art and photography circles in the United States. I think that my work would be a very intelligent investment in the long run for a collector, but for the time being my work is unlikely to be publicly appreciated.
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