You may have noticed that one of three prints of Edward Steichen's "The Pond-Moonlight," taken on Long Island in 1904, sold recently for $2,928,000.
A current discussion about digital printing (under "Inkjet Printing") has made me wonder about the future of such pricing in the digital age. As I understand it, art dealers have held that the object that is collectible, in which a high level of intellectual property is manifest, is the print, not the negative. The collector was buying not a template from which a huge number of (hence low-priced) prints could be made, but a rare artisanal product of the photographer's own hands. With digital it appears that the photographer's unique contribution to the print itself is not at the point of actually producing it, but of producing the digital file to be printed. This file could in principle be shipped to various parts of the world, with precise instructions (such as paper and ink types and driver settings) and identical prints would ensue.
I am sure that many people have thought of this before me. I wonder what solutions photographers and art dealers have in mind. Analogies with wood block prints, lithographs and so on do not seem to hold, as with these sorts of images there can be a credible assertion of a known, finite number of copies. How could this credibly be done with digital? Perhaps I exaggerate the challenge.