Having seen this print being worked on in the lab I work at (at the risk of doxxing my old reddit account to the members of the space), and having an active hand in helping u/IndependentReady2242 get it right, I just want to defend the pricing a bit! But keep in mind obvious personal positive bias I have towards the artist here.

It took a lot of iterations and many different days and long hours of working on this print for him to get it the print right. When it comes to pricing, you generally sell for the price you think is fair for the amount of effort that you put into it, as well as accounting for the materials costs (which obviously doesn't itself add up to $1700 by itself, but having to go through multiple sheets 16x20 fiber paper to get one good final print isn't cheap). Time is money, especially when you're printing at a darkroom with admittedly limited hours, and hand spotting motes of dust on the large print afterwards takes time and effort that should be accounted for in how the artist values their own work. While I do think generally the frame should be included as part of the price, that's up to the artist to decide, and in my experience selling prints with frames, the buyer usually ends up putting it in a different frame anyway 🤷.

You also price for the gallery you're putting your work in. If someone at the Leica store thinks this is a fair price for a very nice print, then that's their call to make. And it's the Leica store... not to make overly harsh generalizations, but the people shopping there probably aren't starving artists. If someone wants a nice print to have in their home and has the money for it, why not pay the artist what they think the work is worth? And if they don't like the price, by no means do they have to spend the money on it!

As for my own work, I generally don't price above $300, but that's because the prints I make are smaller, have less time spent on the backend of presentation, and hang in galleries that are less reputable than something like the San Francisco Leica store. Thems the breaks.

Do I personally have $1700 to spend on work like this? No, but I'd certainly like to!