A friend is going to be giving a TED talk soon. He asked me what it cost to get a family portrait done in the 1850s and guessed “In today’s dollars I expect it was >$1000?” He didn’t say why he was interested but I am assuming that it was part of an argument about the wonders of technological progress.
That set me to searching and I found this page on daguerreotypes, which was the first photographic process that was practical as a consumer product. It turned out that $2 was the price to have a family portrait done by Mathew Brady, whose work today is sought after by art museums. Adjusted for inflation with http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ that’s about $55 today, i.e., about half what you’d pay to have a 19-year-old do a portrait session with a few prints at your local J.C. Penney.
People were much poorer back then. The only countries that could afford the nascent technology were the UK, France and the USA. Germany couldn’t, for instance.
My son’s school, the Singapore American School, recently did their school portraits. The school retained a British company to take the (admittedly nice) pictures of my 9yo. The prices were astonishing — the most efficient solution was to buy the pack of 6 so-called ‘retouched” JPEGs (He’s nine — not 16 — there are no pimples to retouch) for $220…… The printed photos appeared to be an even worse deal. http://www.pret-a-portrait.net/
May not be an exception — another friend has a buddy in Australia that makes (in cash) well over a million AUD every Christmas season — he has a massive network of shopping-center Santa/Photo setups.
I am also astonished by the relative cheapness of vintage photography. Thought all the chemicals and specialised knowledge would cost much more. I expected the equivalent technology of asking you to give me a MRI today — that’s 1500$.
The person who takes those portraits at the shopping mall has many expenses which didn’t exist in 1850:
1) Business operating expenses.
The rent for the commercial space is pretty high due to various reasons, including the availability of air conditioning, electricity, telephone, parking space (including lighting, security, snow plowing), water and sewage etc. Btw, as you may have heard, the electricity generation rates just went up by 75% for many Massachusetts businesses.
2) Transportation costs.
Unless we’re talking about an urban area with good public transportation options, the employees typically have their own vehicle which is expensive to purchase, operate and maintain.
3) Health insurance costs.
The employees need to somehow get health insurance and this doesn’t come cheap.
4) Telecommunication costs.
Talk to any 19-year old and they’ll tell you they *must* have an iPhone and a 4G data plan …
5) Taxes.
Business income tax, employee federal tax and state tax, social security tax, sales tax etc.
It IS interesting that the cost is roughly the same (estimating inflation over the course of centuries is certainly an inexact “science”); the two services are barely comparable. Brady had to work much harder to create his images and couldn’t even dream of producing the kind of images any slightly trained 19 year old can now. I rather suspect that a much higher fraction of the population can afford this kind of portraiture work now than in Brady’s time. It would also be interesting to compare Brady’s price to the current price for photographers of similar stature today.
You can get an 8 x 10 print (larger than any daguerreotype) printed out in full color at your local drugstore for $4, which is something like 15 cents in 1860 dollars.
Everyone carries a camera with them at all times (in their phone). This was all unavailable in the 19th century. For that matter, the 20th. The 1st camera phone (which we take so for granted now) did not appear in the US until 2002. It’s hard to believe that these went from zero to 80+% market penetration in less than one decade.
Labor in general has become relatively more expensive in the US while mass produced goods have become cheaper. An ordinary laborer in 1860 made perhaps 10 cents per hour, so Brady was highly paid relatively speaking. OTOH, one of his cameras would have probably been quite costly. While a disposable camera (that can take 36 pictures!) cost $2.50 today or less than an 1860 dime.
About the school portraits: Don’t discount the possibility that the $220 fee includes a kickback to the school.
Here’s an interesting article about how inflation is not so straightforward http://www.economist.com/node/457272
Inflation indexing is based upon the idea of calculating the cost of a “market basket” of goods and services used by the average consumer and comparing that to the cost of the same basket during some other period. This is an inherently flawed model over very long periods of time because over long periods there are technological changes and social changes so you can no longer really compare one basket to another. The 2014 basket will contain a component for smartphone service and the cost of dishwashers. The 1914 basket has one for livery stable rental for your horse and a dishwasher in 1914 was a person, not a machine. Even when the goods are nominally “the same”, a Ford sedan in 2014 is a vastly more complicated, functional and durable machine than a Model T so you can’t directly compare the price of one to the other. Some things have gone from being incredibly common and cheap to being luxury items or even unobtainium (oysters and caviar). Others have gone from very expensive to cheap or almost free (transatlantic phone calls).
Over the short run (where it has its greatest practical use in determining how much to raise social security pensions, etc. each year) it works fairly well because market baskets change very gradually and not drastically from year to year (and they have statistical techniques for dealing with substitutions and improvements). But even then your personal inflation rate may differ from the index because your market basket may differ from the average persons – maybe you live in NYC and don’t drive a car so you don’t care about the price of autos gas but worry about mass transit prices. Maybe you are vegan so meat prices mean nothing to you. In any given year, some prices go up a lot and some go down so if the things that YOU like happen to have gone up more than average, your personal inflation rate will be higher. But as rough averages to determine annual pension increases, etc. they are close enough for government work.