idea for discussion...

[Papercut]

Not sure exactly which forum to post this in, so I chose the Critique / Salon area since it is the most tightly focused on appreciating the images.

Has anyone ever thought about doing (informal?) print exchanges on RFF?

I know that I appreciate seeing a lot of photos on the gallery here. But often I find myself wishing I could see some of these shots in person, on real paper, instead of small thumbnails on my monitor. Obviously traveling around the world to do that isn't exactly practical. But it got me to thinking about the possibility of doing print exchanges with members here. And I wondered if anyone has thought/talked about this.

At this point I don't really have any concrete proposals to offer, except that the prints would likely have to be kept relatively small (8x12 as largest size, perhaps), but am just trying to suss out whether there's any interest out there in wider RFF-land or if the logistics (for anything more than individuals requesting to exchange prints from other individuals) are just prohibitive?

 

[Blake Werts]

I've had some similar thoughts along these lines as well so you are certainly not alone. I have a friend that does "Artist Trading Cards (ATCs)" and I've thought about trying to propose something similar with photography:

http://www.cedarseed.com/air/atc.html

A stipulation with ATCs is that they measure in size like a modern day sports collectors card--pretty small for a true photograph print, in my opinion. But we could opt to do something similar with 5x7s, etc.

One of the activities that these ATCers like to do is what they call a blind swap or something of the sort. There is a "manager of the swap" and all that are participating send 4 or 5 or however many "cards" to them by some deadline. Then the manager mails back out random "sets" of these cards back to all of the participants. (Hopefully, if the manager has done a good job, you aren't receiving any of your own work back!) We could try some version of this idea?

 

[JeffGreene]

We've had a series of print exchanges over the years. Leica Tom was heading them up a few months ago. I participated in one. We each were paired with another member and had a set period 10 days to 2 weeks to exchange prints. It worked well.

 

[Rafael]

To see the previous RFF print swaps, search for "print swap" in thread titles. I believe that there have been 12 so far.