What comes to pricing Flickr photos, I guess it is question about that there are lot of photographers who are doing tilt shift photography, but they necessarily don’t see any artistic value in their photos, except aesthetical values, maybe because of this reason, it is easier for them, to share pictures online, for free.

I understand that Miklos Gaal is trying to build bigger picture with his works, so repeated technical gimmick is melted together with conceptual ideas, thematics etc. content and it works, atleast if you measure it by success and career prospects.

Price for his works is defined by international art markets. It comes with the time, depending how much the artist is worth on the art markets. So, of course in a way, +12000 £ price tag makes sense, even despite you are getting visually similar photos from flickr for free and probably you could also make quite nice prints of them, if there is not any legal resrictions for not doing them.

In other words, it is the signature which costs and what is the difference between his photos and ordinary flickr photos, I guess biggest difference is reason (~ motivation) for why picture was taken. From most of Flickr tilt shift photos there is missing art context.

As a sidenote, this particular print was not sold on Cristies auction. I don’t say it is good or bad thing, but maybe interesting sidenote for the conversation about price and value between different photos.