I raised my studio rate by 40 euros an hour this month and I still feel sick about it
A gallery in Düsseldorf asked me last week what I charge for a day in the studio when they send a photographer along, and I said 780 euros, plus the canvases are extra. Two years ago I said 540 for the same thing. Nobody blinked. That is the part that bothers me. All those years of 540 were not a market price, they were my nerve failing.
The absurd thing is I only did the math afterwards. I added up the wax, the linen, the ground, the hours of scraping back a layer that did not work, the fact that a 160 by 200 canvas takes me five weeks and I can only really work on one at a time. Divide it out and I had been paying myself something closer to a good electrician's rate, without the security.
So now the number is on paper and it sits badly with me. Not because I think it is too high. Because I know exactly which people I quoted 540 last year and I have not told them anything.
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The five weeks on one canvas is the part most people outside the studio never account for, and it is the honest basis for your number, not a justification you have to apologise for. A day rate that assumes you can run several pieces in parallel is a day rate for a different kind of practice. I came to painting from research, and the shift in how I priced my time was the hardest part of it. Nobody in a lab expects you to bill for the experiment that failed, but here you are in fact billing for it, because the scraped-back layer was work.
You did the arithmetic after the fact, which is the wrong order, but better late than the alternative of never doing it. I would only add that a gallery asking is a good sign. They ask because they have a budget line for it and because they want you specifically. The sickness will fade. The 780 should not.
Billing for the failed layer only works if the number is already built on the whole job. You can't charge per hour for scraping back and then also charge five weeks for one canvas, or you're counting the same hours twice. The rate covers the practice. The failure is inside it, not on top of it. That's why the five-week figure holds up and the day rate argument gets shaky. Hourly thinking is the wrong tool for work like this.
You are right and it stings a little to read it put so plainly. The scraping back happens inside the five weeks, not on top of it, and if I let myself bill it separately I am doing exactly the double count you describe. Naja. The day rate is a convenience for the photographer job, not a theory of the work. I think what I was really trying to say is that the gallery should pay for the whole practice when they want to use the studio, and I reached for the failed layer because it is the part people never see. Wrong handle for it.
The lab parallel is the most useful thing anyone has said here. Billing for the failed experiment is exactly it, and nobody in that world apologises for it either.
But your last line is where I get stuck. I did the arithmetic after the fact, ja. I think that was the only way I could do it at all. If I had built the number bottom-up first, I would have found a hundred reasons each line was too much to ask, and I would still be at 540. So it came out sideways, and now I have to live with a number I did not fully reason my way into. Maybe that is backwards, but it worked.