A simple idea

After last year’s People’s Photography exhibition I had almost all of the photographs I had printed and mounted for the exhibition still in my possession, and so I devised a little game to help me offload them, and offset my costs in preparing the 30-odd photos that I had put together for the two days around St. Stephen’s Green.  More about that on Monday when that particular game makes a return to the blog.  In the meantime, this year’s exhibition, for me, has been all about another little game that I came up with – an idea so simple, yet one that took off like I never expected.

The game was a fairground favourite – Lucky Dip – and my photographic version involved a collection of envelopes, each containing a small print, unmounted, all different.  For the sum of €1 a player could pick any envelope they wanted and kept the contents.  I pitched it as a fun way of getting a photographic print to brighten up your home or office, and it seems I struck a chord with the passing public on St. Stephen’s Green earlier today.  Within a few hours I was sold out, and had more people go away with smiles on their faces than I could have hoped for.

A few fellow photographers commented on the €1 cost, and suggested I should have been asking for €2, but I felt this was critical to the whole experiment.  It needed to be pitched at a level to tempt a passer-by into playing, and such that if they didn’t like their print, they didn’t feel like they’d been robbed.  And as it turned out, no one went away (as far as I know) unhappy.  There were a few people who weren’t instantly in love with the photo they’d received, so I let them swap for another and that worked well.

So where did the prints come from?  You may remember that last November I applied for and received my LIPF, judged on a panel of 10 images.  In the process of creating that panel I had printed about 125 small prints for the purposes of figuring out which 10 would make the final panel, and how they might be laid out.

Since then the 125 prints have sat in a drawer – until I stumbled across them on Thursday evening while preparing for People’s Photography 2010.   I decided that as they were unmounted and unprotected, I couldn’t display or sell them loose as they would be destroyed as people flicked through them, so instead decided to place each one in its own envelope – thereby protecting them – and making them available (cheaply) via a lucky dip game – thereby avoiding people wanting to view them all.

Cheaply turned out to be essentially cost price, but in this case the bulk of the cost (paper and ink) was spent a long while ago, and so had effectively been written off anyway.  The envelopes cost 12c each, and I purchased them on Friday.

So while it was a break-even exercise, it also managed to feel like it paid for dinner tonight.  And the feel-good factor from it was great – getting to see people’s reactions as they opened their envelopes was fun.  The highlight was when two happy customers left with the parting words: “You’ve made two old ladies very happy”.  Who could ask for more?

If you’re around Dublin tomorrow (Sunday 29th August) pop by the railings on the North Edge of St. Stephen’s Green and you’ll find me in stand number 28.  Lucky Dip returns tomorrow with a new batch of freshly-printed 6″x4″ prints so come along and play!