What Collectable Photobooks Sell For

Photobooks are one of the few corners of book collecting that still behaves like a young market. Print runs are small, the people who care about them care a lot, and a monograph that cost €45 in a museum shop can be worth several hundred a decade later.

They are also badly documented. Ask what a Daido Moriyama or a Nan Goldin is worth and you will get anecdotes about the record-breakers, not a price you can use.

So I went through the database this site runs on — 800,385 real auction and marketplace results — and pulled out every lot credited to a named photographer. That gives 17,967 photobook lots across 99 photographers, each with the price somebody actually paid.

Here is what they sell for.

The typical photobook makes €62

That is the headline, and it is a modest one. Across all 17,967 lots the typical sale is €62, against €60 for the book, map and print market as a whole. As a category, photobooks are ordinary.

The interesting part is how wide the spread inside that category is.

Steve McCurry tops the list at €121 (145 lots). Steven Meisel follows at €110 (294 lots), though that one comes with a caveat: almost all of those lots are copies of Madonna's Sex, a 1992 book that has become a collectable in its own right. It is a real result, but it is one book, not a body of work.

Karl Blossfeldt at €102 (89 lots) is the quiet surprise — 1930s German plant studies, still selling for nearly double the market average ninety years on.

At the other end, Nobuyoshi Araki typically sells for €46 across 1,359 lots, the second-largest sample in the study. Araki is among the most collected names in photography. He is also among the most prolific publishers in it, with hundreds of separate titles in print, and that is exactly the point: when a photographer's output is that large, most individual books are not scarce.

The same logic explains Helmut Newton at €65 despite 1,152 lots, and Martin Parr at €60. These are famous names with big back catalogues. Fame and scarcity are different things, which is the single most useful idea in whether an old book is worth anything at all.

Where a Salgado and an anonymous photobook part company

Photography as a subject types at around €50 in this market. Named photographers type at €62, and the ones at the top of that chart reach €100 and beyond. Those figures look like they disagree. They do not — they are measuring two different things.

Take every lot in the database whose description is about photography but which carries no recognised photographer's name: local view albums, press archives, technique manuals, anonymous studio work. That is 8,796 lots, and the typical one sells for €54.

Now take the named ones: 17,967 lots, typical €62. Now take just Salgado: €80 across 265 lots — and a signed Salgado, €140.

So an anonymous photobook makes €54, a named one €62, a top name €100 to €121 — about twice as much — and a signed Salgado €140, more than two and a half times. Almost all of that gap is the name on the cover. Nothing about the object changes. The paper, the printing and the binding of an unattributed 1970s photo album are often better than a modern print-on-demand monograph. What it lacks is somebody's reputation attached to it.

That is worth knowing if you are clearing a house. A box of anonymous photography books is almost certainly a €54-per-lot proposition. One book with the right name on the spine can be worth more than the rest of the box together.

A signature is worth more here, not less

This is the finding I expected to go the other way.

Photographers sign constantly. Book launches at galleries, signing tables at Paris Photo, editions produced specifically to be signed — the supply of signed photobooks is far larger, relative to the market, than the supply of signed novels. That should push the premium down.

It does the opposite.

Comparing each photographer against themselves — the only honest way to do this — the typical signature premium for a photobook is 2.08×, across 59 photographers who had enough sales on both sides. For 55 of those 59, signed copies beat unsigned ones.

The equivalent figure for books in general is 1.63×. So a signature does noticeably more work on a photobook than it does on a novel. The full picture for books is in what a signature is really worth, and the contrast is striking: photobook signing is more common, and yet it pays better.

The likely reason is who is buying. Photobook collectors overlap heavily with print collectors, and for that audience a signature converts a book into something closer to a signed artwork. On top of that, many signed photobooks are signed at the launch, in the year of publication, which is itself evidence of a first printing — and first printings are what this market cares about.

Look at Araki again. He sits at the bottom of the price chart at €46, and yet signed Araki lots type at €130 against €45 unsigned — 2.89× (81 signed, 1,278 unsigned). The cheapest big name in photography has one of the largest signature premiums in it. Both facts have the same cause: he published enormously, so an ordinary copy is common and a signed one is the version worth having.

The exceptions are instructive too. Alec Soth is the only name on that chart below 1× (0.67×, from 151 signed and 100 unsigned lots). Soth signs so routinely that signed copies are the default in this market, and the unsigned pool ends up containing the scarce early titles. That is the same mechanism described in whose signatures are worth least.

Two things I could not test, and one I could

I went in wanting to test the publisher — Steidl, Aperture, MACK, Taschen — and the first-edition question. Both turned out to be unanswerable from this data, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing up a weak number.

Publishers barely appear in listings. Across the 592,936 book lots there are 15 mentions of Steidl, 48 of Aperture and 52 of MACK — and most of those are false matches (a Mack Truck model, an ammonite with an aperture). Auction titles here are written as photographer – title – year, so the imprint is simply not in the text. There may well be a Steidl premium. This database cannot see it.

"First edition" is almost never written on a photobook lot. Only 0.28% of photobook lots use the phrase, against 1.76% across the database as a whole — six times rarer. Not one photographer had enough labelled lots to make a fair comparison. The reason is the listing convention: photobook lots carry a year instead, and collectors read the year as the edition. If a Moriyama says 1972, that is the first printing; a 2012 reissue says 2012. For how much that label is worth when sellers do use it, see what a first edition is actually worth.

What I could test is the limited or numbered edition, and that one is real. Photobook lots describing a numbered or limited edition type at €160 against €62 for the rest (119 lots against 17,848). The sample is small and I would not build a valuation on it, but it points the same way as everything else here: in photobooks, the scarce physical version of a book is what carries the price.

What the top of the market looks like

Very briefly, because it is where the myths come from.

Of the 17,967 photobook lots, 28.5% cleared €100, 9.2% cleared €200 and only 1.9% cleared €500. To be in the top 1% of photobooks a lot needs about €739.

The most expensive single lot is a copy of Helmut Newton's SUMO at €7,500 — the oversized limited edition that comes with its own Philippe Starck stand. Six of the ten highest results in the whole photobook set are SUMO copies. After that: Salgado's Genesis Art Edition at €5,750, a signed Michael Kenna at €5,500, and a signed Annie Leibovitz Collector's Edition at €3,700.

Notice what every one of those has in common. They are limited editions, signed copies, or both. None of them is simply a good book by a famous photographer.

What to do with this

If you are selling. Put the photographer's name first and the year second — that is how this market reads a listing, and burying the name costs you real money. If the copy is signed, say so and say how: an inscription to a named person dated at a launch is worth more than a bare autograph. If it is numbered, give the number.

If you are buying. The going rate for a good monograph by a collected photographer is €60–€100, and a seller asking €300 for an unsigned trade edition is asking you to pay gallery-shop nostalgia. Check what copies have actually sold for before you agree. Our checklist for evaluating a book deal covers the rest of the questions worth asking, and how to read an auction result explains why the number you see is not always the number that was paid.

If you have inherited a shelf of them. Sort by name, not by how impressive the book looks. The heavy coffee-table volume with no photographer credited is a €54 lot. The slim, ugly, Japanese-language paperback from 1975 might not be.

How this was worked out

Every figure above comes from lots in the site's own database of 800,385 auction and marketplace results, filtered down to the 592,936 that are genuinely books, maps or prints — the raw catalogue also contains watches, model trains and cars, which have to be stripped out before any of this means anything.

A lot counts as a photobook here if the photographer's name appears in the author position of the listing title, and only photographers with at least 25 lots are included. That gives 99 names. It is a conservative definition: it will miss photobooks credited to an editor or a museum, and it excludes anonymous work by design, which is why the anonymous figure is reported separately.

All prices are typical sales — the middle of the range — rather than averages, because one €7,500 SUMO would otherwise rewrite Helmut Newton's whole row. Sample sizes are given throughout so you can judge how much weight each figure deserves. And age, incidentally, does almost nothing here that it does not do elsewhere; if you were hoping an old photobook is automatically a valuable one, does age make a book valuable is the short answer.

To check a specific photographer or title against real sales rather than my summary of them, search the database — every result links back to the original listing.