Interesting, what do you mean by this? Photography is still a labor-intensive process. The object needs to be taken out of and returned to storage, the lighting and exposure needs to be right, multiple shots for details, etc. Besides making the photo, museums sometimes charge for use in a publication.
I often used to photograph garments from my collection for articles I wrote for antiques magazines. Unless you want one of those laid-out-flat photos that looks like roadkill and does not show the 3D appearance, you need to make the garment look good. This means steaming out wrinkles, mounting the garment on a form of the right size, and arranging it just so, often doing things like stuffing tissue paper into big sleeves to support them. It's quite labor intensive--which is why museums typically only take such photos in conjunction with exhibits where they have already mounted the garment for the exhibit.
And for all this, the garment already needs to have been cleaned and preserved (or at least the weak parts mounted onto something for support), something museums do not always have the money to do for everything in their collection.
Printing processes have already become cheaper and putting a photo on a website is even cheaper than that.
I have not noticed offset book printing becoming cheaper over the years. Any savings the printer has made over changes in processes (which mostly amount to printing direct to plate instead of making negatives), have been countered by increases in paper prices.
Savings in color printing are mostly achieved by having it done in China, or a third-world country. But that carries its own set of problems, including shipping, and the larger economic issue of offshoring jobs.
Print-on-demand printing, which is a laser-printing process that does not involve making plates, is significantly more expensive than offset printing. You can print fewer copies at a time, but the POD cost per unit is always higher. The quality of halftones is not as good as for offset, and the quality of color photos is often pretty bad compared to offset.
The cost of printed museum catalogs is somewhat muddied, compared to regular publishing, because the catalog may be partly funded by revenues from the exhibit, or by public funding, rather than entirely by its own sales.
Fran Lavolta Press Books on historic clothing www.lavoltapress.com _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
