Two years ago, I started getting bored with my photography. Instead of creating new work, I was fulfilling orders from photographs I had done years before--I was feeling less than creative.
By printing single editions of photographs, I feel that I better encapsulate the true nature of photography. What used to be impossible, freezing moments in time, now become 1/125 of a second printed on watercolor paper, or 1/30 of a second, when using a slow shutter speed. At any shutter fraction, these micro moments allow us to pause the intricacies of sunlight reflecting on a lake. Printing each millisecond only once, I feel that I'm better representing the fleeting nature of what photography allows.
I started doing the math on my editions, if I take 30 photographs, and do an edition of 50, I'll have to sell 1500 prints before selling out. Considering that I surpassed taking 100,000 photos years ago, the edition scale was becoming more ridiculous, the more photos I put into editions, the exponence became laughable. If I add another 300 photos, at an edition of 50, it will take 15,000 photos to sell out.
I just printed 92 new photos, some slight variations of each other, like above, 92 photos in editions of ones, an easy 92 to add up. Had I had done my previous editions, 92 times 50, leads to a staggerring 4,600 edition size that could have been inititiated during the last week of March 2015.
So really, the edition size was actually holding me back. There's no way I would have added 92 new photos. By moving beyond these large editions, it's constantly pushing me to come up with new work.
by Kasey Child