Firm Promotes Platinum Pictures

When Jason Myrold was a student at the Minneapolis College of Art 10 years ago, he became passionate about platinum photography, an expensive and involved process that can make photographs last more or less forever.

Seeing as there weren’t too many people in the U.S. who even knew about it, let alone trying to make a living from it, he thought he would give it a shot.

Three years ago, he began the process of setting up Myrold Studios (http://www.myroldstudios.com), an operation that specializes in platinum photography. But he didn’t really get it going until a few months ago.

“Technically I started studio back in 2004 but I’d say I launched it this year because that’s when I got all the equipment together to be viable,” he says. “There’s a lot of specialized equipment involved and a ton of knowledge to how to do it in an efficient manner.”

Unlike conventional photographs, platinum photographs are expensive ($325 for an eight-by-10-inch print up to $3,000 for a 24-by-30-inch print), must be handmade and can’t be mass-produced.

“You can’t go into a one-hour photo mart and have them made,” he says.

He points out that conventional photographs really only last about 100 years.

Specifically, the Minneapolis-based company offers portrait photographs and printing and restoration of existing photographs so that they’ll last. Prospects can e-mail the firm at [email protected] to get started.

“The market is pretty much anybody who wants to really focus on creating a historical archive,” says Myrold.

For the moment, Myrold is pursuing a low-key strategy to promoting his operation, relying on words-of-mouth and press releases and the like, acknowledging it’s going to take a lot of “education” and that not the product is really suitable for certain niche markets such as historical societies and upscale families who are interested in keeping archives.

In keeping with this, Myrold notes he’s talking with some regional magazines to help promote his firm. “Regional lifestyle magazines would be a good avenue to educate people about the archival qualities of platinum photography,” he says.

“The process is not brand new but I think the idea of bringing it to a market is,” says Myrold. “There’s a handful of platinum printers in the United States and they do printing for people but not on a big scale or with this concept in mind.

“I want to make it much more well known than has been in place so far,” he says.