ART AND COMMERCE 2025

JANUARY 23, 2026

                                                                 CALATRAVA'S POETRY, MY ABSTRACTION

As is my custom at the end of every year, I’ve spent the past few days taking a hard look at my images from the past year in an effort to determine a very subjective selection of my “best” images from 2025. This list is an attempt to discover what images best fit the criteria of a “Rich” image that captures my unique view of the world. These twenty images meet no other test than that - and while I hope you find them at least interesting, this is my list, so your opinions will not sway me in the least. 

              A TRAIN TERMINAL TAKES WING AT GROUND ZERO

The subjects vary considerably, and like most photographers I will pretend that the strength of an image has nothing to do with the “subject” but is based on my interpretation alone. Of course this a bald-faced lie, but what I find interesting might mean nothing to a viewer. My job is to convey my fascination with what I found in my viewfinder, even if you wouldn’t have noticed it, or might swear that it bore little reference with the actual scene I encountered that day. 

                                     MY OLD FRIEND T REX AT THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

It has been said that if you want to take more interesting photos, then it pays to go more interesting places. This year Fran and I got to go back to New York for the first time in years, and also spent three weeks on the North Carolina coast visiting Benjamin, Margaret, and Isaac. These trips provided about half of these images. What I discovered as usual is that the excitement of travel is tempered after a few days with the realization that your best images are the ones you usually take no matter how experimental you are trying to act, and that there is nothing wrong with that result.

                                     A BAKERY PORTRAIT

I’ve been working on my next book, and two of these images from San Francisco have been rescued from my archives, which suffered a worse than usual computer debacle as a result of my mistakes and the combined idiocy of Apple and Adobe. It is delightful when you discover a forgotten gem from a trip that you took decades ago. On the other hand it is frustrating in the extreme when you need to use Google to solve a problem with Apple or Adobe’s software. It doesn’t help when my IT advisor, Fran, declares that that was the obvious solution, second only to her eternal admonition to “shut it down” as the answer to any computer mishap.

                                     "BLACK ROCK" PORTRAIT - I WAS SHOCKED TO REALIZE THAT CBS HAD GIVEN WAY TO CHARLES SCHWAB

The balance of these images were created on walks in the neighborhood. I spent a good part of the year facing a steep learning curve with my new old camera. Even though it was ten years old, it was leagues ahead of the nearly twenty-year-old camera it replaced. My attempts at mastery of this new old technology gave me all the excuses that I needed to just go out and see if I could even make this strange new tool work for me. While I marveled at some of the advancements, I gradually concluded that it would best serve me if I continued to use the new camera in pretty much exactly the same way that I had used the old one. 

                                                                 NYU SHADOWS

I also realized that while I loved the Fuji’s mechanical excellence, I was not particularly interested in the myth of “straight-out-of-the-camera” that seemed to thrill my fellow Fuji fanboys. All of these images are so much better having seen a few minutes in Lightroom than they were on the day I captured them on the street. Some of them bear little resemblance to what the Fuji saw that day, as it should be - these are my images, not my camera’s.

              ABSTRACT PIER PANORAMA, NORTH CAROLINA COAST

My success, or lack thereof, in actually selling these images at Saturday Market, constituted the other half of the Art/Commerce equation. After adding it all up, my business results were more or less equal to last year’s, which were no great shakes. I did stick to my guns as a “fair weather vendor”, so there were no days sitting in the rain, wind, and cold. I was surprised to realize that I actually attended four more days in 2025 than I had last year and somehow earned less money. The trouble was that my average was down a good $50.00 each day I spent at the Market, no matter how much fun I was having there. It also didn’t help that I had five more days in 2025 than in 2024 when I actually lost money by attending the market that day. It doesn’t take much business acumen to realize that this is not a winning strategy. The sad fact is that even if I subtracted those seven bad days, my average take was still less than last year’s. 

                                     SHADOWS AND SURF

I don’t think that I did much worse than most of my fellow vendors. At our annual meeting this year I was not the only one surprised that the number of Post-Covid vendors is now almost equal to the old dinosaurs like myself. While there are certainly people at the Market who sell much more than I do, on my walks around the Market I can’t for the life of me figure out how most of my fellow vendors make a go of it.

               ALPENGLOW WITH SEAGULLS, NORTH CAROLINA COAST

                ALPENGLOW WITH MOONRISE, NORTH CAROLINA COAST

As usual I made most of my money being a “coaster monger.”  This despite the fact that I now sell less than half of the coasters that I did in the last years before Covid, and way less than in my peak years. In fact the coasters I sold this past year constitute about 1% of my total coaster sales in my fifteen years at the market. 

                                    TELEPHOTO JUXTAPOSITION AT SAN FRANCISCO'S SOUTH OF MARKET NEIGHBORHOOD

                                                                 SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ATRIUM SHADOWS

My second “magic bullet” at the market, my metal prints, continued to decline. They are just too expensive a product, despite my attempts to discount the price on the theory that I paid for some of them more than a decade ago. I’m almost to the point of considering them as just my own prints, except that my house is too small to display them, and my wife objects to any change in the “collection” that she has gotten used to seeing in her own home.

               STROLLING THROUGH LAURELHURST PARK, LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW

               AN EXPERIMENTAL, AT LEAST FOR ME, WOODLAND PANORAMA CROP ON MT. TABOR

                                      A MULTIPLE FLORAL PORTRAIT, WHICH I STARTED TO PURSUE WHEN SINGLE FLOWERS BEGAN TO BE MUCH TOO EASY

My third “magic bullet” is my “miniature” line which resulted from my customer’s inability to imagine that coasters could be displayed on a wall. These thicker panels continue to sell despite the fact that they cost more than twice as much as the nearly identical coasters. I might try expanding the line this year. Telling tales out-of-school, the vagaries of the international supply chain have now brought down the price of these small wood panels below the inflated price of the coasters! Go figure.

                                     MAYBERRY RFD, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS DIVISION STREET

               VISUAL CACOPHONY ON DIVISION STREET

                                      SHADOWPLAY ON DIVISION

I’ve almost abandoned framed prints this year, as the amount I can get for a frame is pretty much exactly what it costs me to buy them wholesale. This doesn’t even include the waste each time I have to get the broom to clean up yet another shattered art work which has met it’s end on the concrete.

                                                                 A HALLOWEEN DISPLAY IN AN APARTMENT ON DIVISION STREET

                                     THE END, A NEW BAR ON DIVISION STREET

I’ve reached the point on my Market journey where I have reached the enviable position that I don’t really have to make money as an artist. I still have to get up way too early, and spend far too long outside, but the conversations and generally good time I have with the visitors to my little gallery more than make up for it. This year I placed art in 84 more places all around the United States, and in 15 more places around the world, most which I have no right to think that Richard Lishner would have ever made even a minuscule impact in a million years. My art which I have sold in 62 countries around the world now includes artifacts in Delhi and Pune, India; St. Etien and Angulem in France; Halu in Sweden; Brzeg in Poland; Christchurch in New Zealand; and Hotienheim and Ladenburg in Germany. Not bad for a boy from Queens.