Purest Image is the possibility to buy beautiful downloadable images directly from the photographer without any markups from gallery owners or photography agents.
Also, working with downloadable high resolution digital files that you can have printed and framed by a quality printer in your own city and country means complete freedom. More specifically, it means that all the in between physical costs for making large prints, framing, shipping costs across the world, insurance, custom fees etc. are eliminated when customers can download a digital file in high resolution. This will cut costs tremendously, ensuring that beautiful images are available to a much broader audience across the world for only a fraction of the normally charged prices. Fine Art images are no longer exclusively available for those with limitless bank accounts.
John has worked with gallery owners and photography agents and with all the markups and limited editions clauses, images would end up costing many thousands of dollars, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars while the images themselves could have been sold for much less if this system of sales would be adapted to a more modern way of doing things in this wonderful digital age.
This in term will also give the buyer complete freedom as to how to print and frame the image. John is presently based in the Amsterdam-Netherlands area and up till now he used one of the finest local printers to print and frame images after which they where sent across the world, this leading to many of the previously mentioned additional costs.
Of course, there are excellent printers in most of the countries across the world so in a way in our modern digital age, it does not make sense to go through this physical proces in the Netherlands, which adds a tremendous amount of costs, and then send this print across the world to a buyer.
A note on trust: Photographers can be very protective of the use of their images and not without good reason! John, originally being a classical musician with a conservatory degree, has always lived in an art scene in Amsterdam. There he witnessed highly talented violin players not being able to buy a first class violin like a Stradivarius which can cost up to 10 million dollars to express music with their exceptional talent. Instead, many of these instruments are bought by rich investors to become even richer. Some of these instruments are never played on and are kept in a well guarded fault. From an artistic point of view, this does not make sense.
The same goes for highly talented young photographers who simply cannot afford a Leica camera with lenses that from a talent and artistic point of view would be fully justifiable. When we look at fine art prints, we have also gotten used to the fact that these should cost a lot of money, enormously limiting the number of people that can enjoy them. This is of course one of the reasons why we have museums, so the general public can admire fine art paintings of the famous masters. Only a happy few can afford to privately buy such paintings and hang them in their own house for private viewing. Over the past 20 years or so, John has been seeing this happen more and more with fine art printing of beautiful photographs.
A second reason for buying limited edition prints of well known photographers is the possibility of these prints increasing in value over the years so this could become a good investment as well. 'Could' is the right word because statistics show that most fine art prints do not increase in value, on the contrary. If a large amount of money is invested up front, it could have been overpriced by a good gallery salesman that gave way to optimistic predictions on the future value. Over the past few years, John has had many discussions with fellow photographers, gallery owners, photography agents and art-buyers. Most of them want to protect these 'old world' selling traditions. From the freedom of choice, John respects this but has broken free himself from this traditional way of selling his images. He feels that making his finest images available in an affordable way to a much broader audience across the world does his art more justice. In this way many more people can enjoy his images and this is one of the reasons he is a photographer in the first place. What is a photographer without a large audience?
In the Purest Image webshop you can purchase all images in 3 different image sizes:
1. 72 dpi files, for digital use as, for instance, a wallpaper.
2. 300 dpi high resolution files, for editorial use in a printed or online magazine.
3. 300 dpi super high resolution files for Fine Art printing.