Objects not data: a photography and illustration print experiment

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.

—Stewart Brand

There is a tension inherent in the economic nature of data.

Data can be endlessly copied. That’s its nature. This will drive down the value of data under pretty much every economic system that’s realistically available to us. That’s what the anthropomorphic “wants to be free” means.

Data is now also our primary representation of most work of value. Designs, writing, images, and illustrations exist because we make them. That takes work, experience, education, training, and – quite often – equipment. That’s why “it” also wants to be expensive. Its very existence has a cost that won’t disappear just because you can make copies.

This tension has existed since the early days of the internet.

The balance on the scale between “free” and “expensive” has steadily been shifting towards free, but people have also been reevaluating their relationship with digital media for very good reasons.

How often have you lost access to something you loved because the only copy you had was behind a cloud or streaming subscription somewhere?

You pay companies and people monthly subscriptions for years, but what are you left with when it’s all said and done?

Nothing.

Information – digital media – wants to be expensive because the expressions they carry are inherently valuable.

But it’s also not always a great deal – especially subscriptions where the only thing you’re getting for your money is ephemeral access.

We’d all like something more robust that feels worthwhile and personally valuable.

Standardised files, such as ebooks, are a useful compromise for both the creator and the reader – they genuinely do work – but given the declining state of many things digital, I think many of us want things we can hold in our hands.

At least as an option.

This is why I’ve been exploring various forms of print to complement the digital ebooks business. I’ve started with print books – and I have more print ideas I’d like to explore – but I don’t think it should end there.

Over the next few months, I’ll be experimenting with selling art and photography prints as a way to fund my work on this newsletter and as a publisher.

I take quite a few photographs. Brynhildur Jenný both photographs and illustrates.

There are quite a few professional art print services around the world, that offer high quality prints on archival – gallery quality – paper.

I’m planning on offering a series of prints – a selection of our work – using theprintspace a service that offers Giclée art printing in the US, UK, and EU.

Now, unfortunately, I won’t be able to offer these prints in the EU. While Iceland has a manageable VAT thresholds for individuals and small businesses, if you’re a non-EU business using a drop-shipping service based in the EU, you are obliged to handle VAT on the shipment no matter how low your volume is. As far as I can tell, that requires a lot of additional tax bureaucracy for me both here in Iceland and in the EU which won’t be worthwhile if the prints only sell a few occasional copies.

Figuring out an optimal solution to that bureaucratic problem is not going to be straightforward. I’d like to sort this out over the next few months, but in the meantime I won’t be able to ship to the EU.

(It might be genuinely simpler for me to invest in a Giclée-quality printer and ship EU orders from Iceland, but I’m not willing to go that far yet.)

For the first batch of prints, I’ve selected four pictures. Each is available in two sizes, each size is limited to 25 copies each picture, and they all come with a certificate of authenticity.

• 30cm x 40cm / 11.8" x 15.8" for €75 EUR
• 18cm x 24cm / 7.1" x 9.4" for €45.00 EUR

My primary approach for choosing the sizes was to use the obligatory Nordic heuristic: what seems to be easily available in Ikea?

So, instead of overthinking the print sizes, I just went with some of the common photo frame sizes on offer in Ikea and Jysk, which is also the reason why I’m focusing on smaller print sizes to begin with.

This might be an issue for people in the US (not sure what the standard sizes are there) and if the only place in your city that has frames that fit turns out to be Ikea, then I apologise in advance.

I’m open to other print sizes in future experiments. Let me know if you have specific suggestions.

I chose two recent photos I took here in Hveragerði. Brynhildur Jenný chose two pictures of hers.

• Horses in the Mist
• The Raven and the Church
• The Cat and I and the Flower
• Strange Little Hut (Ugly Reykjavík)

I’ve outlined each photo in more detail below.

We’re very much open to suggestions as well, so if there are any specific photos of mine or from the Ugly Reykjavík project that you’d like a print of, just let me know.

Shipping costs are per order (not per print) and if you order more than one print at a time, you’ll get a 25% discount on the second and subsequent prints.

Let me know what you think.

Horses in the Mist

The geothermal areas around the town of Hveragerði emit quite a bit of steam. When the air is cold and the wind is still, that steam combines with the mist to sit over the landscape like a fog.

We also have horses.

It is a Giclée art print on Hahnemühle Pearl, a highly durable paper with a satin finish whose natural white colour and resin coating lends depth to the photograph.

The Raven and the Church

Ravens often seek out tall places to better observe their surroundings. In many small towns, that’s going to be the local church. This black and white photo captures a raven perching on the Hveragerði town church steeple.

Again, a Giclée print on Hahnemühle Pearl.

Strange Little Hut (Ugly Reykjavík)

The Ugly Reykjavík photography project by Brynhildur Jenný aims to document the parts of Reykjavík and Iceland as experienced by those that live there—the parts of the country that are less classically picturesque and show us an Iceland that has been lived in, as seen by those living in it.

The photo is a Giclée art print, using Hahnemühle Pearl paper produced and delivered by a professional art printing service.

The Cat and I and the Flower

An illustration from the Icelandic graphic novel The Cat and I by Brynhildur Jenný, which is a touching autobiographical story about a girl growing up in nineties Iceland and her cat.

The illustration is a Giclée print on Hahnemühle Bamboo. The paper’s matt texture and off-white warm tones was chosen as it best represented the paper Brynhildur Jenný used when she drew the illustration by hand, in order to create a final print that most accurately reflected the original.