Snapshot

Notable Drops

• Carlo Van de Roer

• Charlie Rubin

The Latest

• Imag3Aid

• Art3

• Assembly

• Fellowship

• Obscura

• Quantum

Photographer of the Week

• Lily Callisto

Collector’s Corner

• Taking the Long View

Bookshelf:

• Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Notable Drops

Carlo Van de Roer: Modulator One

Carlo Van de Roer has released his newest collection, Modulator One, a collection of 48 generative still images and an interactive video. The artist describes the work as an “experiment in collaboratively authoring a past moment,” and pieces of the collection will be generated based on the “DNA” of the owner’s wallet address. The work represents a means to establish a technological collaboration between artist and collector, with each image offering a different iteration of a single past moment in time. 

https://opensea.io/collection/carlo-van-de-roer-modulator-one

Charlie Rubin: Strange Paradise

NY-based artist Charlie Rubin has dropped his genesis collection, Strange Paradise, on Foundation this week. The playful and enigmatic series experiments with photographic conventions through various manipulation techniques. Rubin is known for editorial work that he has shot for publications such as New York Times, New Yorker, Vice, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Alongside his drop, the artist released a mind-bending virtual exhibition on New Art City.

https://foundation.app/collection/strangeparadise

The Latest

Imag3Aid

Imag3Aid is nearing its public announcement for its upcoming photography fundraiser to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The project has gathered the work of 57 prominent photographers in the NFT space, and will be offering each image in an edition of 50 via a custom minting contract. 100% of primary sales and secondary royalties donated to The Ukraine Emergency Response Fund.

Assembly

Assembly announced the upcoming debut of its web3 marketplace this week, a stand-alone curated site that will expand on the platform’s program of phorotraphy drops.

With this news, Assembly previewed its next drop by Daniel Gordon in a collection titled Moving/Still. The collection will be the second drop from Gordon, whose genesis collection Portrait Studio sold out within hours of its opening. Gordon is widely recognized in the traditional art photography world for his innovative work that blends photography with appropriation and hand-made paper sculpture. 

Fellowship

Yesterday, Fellowship released a mammoth 188 piece collection by photographer Jonas Bendiksen. The photographer’s project, The Book of Veles, combines documentary images, 3-d models, AI-generated portraits, and screen captures of a fake social media account in a dizzying exploration of “post-truth” documentation. The project was produced in relation to Veles, Macedonia, which became a hub of fake news production in the run up to the 2016 US election.

In other news, Fellowship’s August Sander collection has been reinstated on OpenSea after the project had been taken down as a result of a copyright dispute with SK Stiftung Kultur, an artist foundation in Cologne, Germany which had purchased the August Sander Estate in 1992. While we don’t know the details of the legal agreements behind the collection, and the disputes may be ongoing, owners of the collection can breathe a bit easier for the time being. The event comes after an announcement by Julian Sander, the great-grandson of the photographer, announced that owners of the NFTs will be able to receive a physical print of the contact sheet that each token represents. 

Obscura

Obscura released the latest collection from its Magnum photographer commission program, a body of work by Alec Soth called Dissolutions. The project revisits the photographer's legendary photobook, Sleeping by the Mississippi, by presenting short videos of the images from the project undergoing a process of dissolution via an unknown chemical process. On the project, Soth states that he wanted to make something that “spoke directly to…transmutation of meaning from the physical to the ephemeral.”

https://obscura.io/curated/alec-soth

Quantum

Quantum’s latest drop is by portrait photographer Joni Sternbach, a large-format, wetplate photographer whose collection Her Wave documents female surfers around the world. The New York-based photographer has exhibited widely over her long career, and her work has been collected by LACMA, The National Portrait Gallery of London, Nelson Atkins Museum, and other large museum collections.

Photographer of the Week: Lily Callisto

Australian photographer Lily Callisto’s work explores motherhood, ephemerality, and explorations of both sacred and mundane. Her poetic work resides in a space where words fall short, and the emotional ressonance of the moment stands at center stage. Her various NFT collections represent both a dedicated and broad-minded approach to her practice, all centered on familial relationships and imagery that feels as if its grasping to hold on to treasured moments.

PhotoVerso: Can you tell us about your background as a photographer?

Lily Callisto: My practice focuses on the ephemeral years of the mother-child dyad. As my ideas about society and the world and the realities of motherhood collided in sometimes painful and unexpected ways, I was compelled to document the sacred, the mundane and the inherent contradictions within life and motherhood as earnestly as I could. Subtle themes of environmental dread, family conflict and mother centred feminism play around the edges of the photographs, but at it’s heart my photography is very much a practice of memory keeping, for my own family and for others.

PV: What inspires you as a photographer and what do you hope audiences take away from your work?

LC: I draw a lot of inspiration from my past, my childhood, and the semi-rural landscape I live in. I love historical photographs, and the work of photographers, particularly women, who turn the camera towards their own families and communities, to the gritty realities of femaleness and family, whether the scenes in their photographs are constructed from their imaginations or taken with a documentary approach, I love photographs that can be viscerally felt.

PV: What's the scoop with your latest NFT drop?

LC: The last photo I minted, “After the Flood” in my ONE OF ONE collection on Foundation, is an image I took days after my community experienced catastrophic floods. It’s just one image in a story of widespread destruction, whole houses buried under landslides, people stuck in their roof cavities as the water rose beneath them, cutting their way out with butterknives and waiting days to be rescued from their roofs, dead livestock and displaced people. Even though the Australian government can help, to date they’ve provided too little, too late. So I’m raising funds for my community to rebuild and recover with the sale of this NFT. Apart from that, I’m working away on Obscura’s TWT10K commission.

Collector’s Corner: Taking the Long View

In a market environment in which days feel like weeks, bombardments of social messaging overload us with stimuli, and photographs are bought and sold and rapid rates, it can be difficult to step back and view the NFT landscape with a long-term perspective. Despite the chaotic nature of this space, it’s important to measure time horizons for collecting, and to remember that the emergence of NFT collecting is still in its infancy.

What does this mean? For one, its perhaps prudent to consider that the bulk of NFT collectors are those who were early adopters of cryptocurrency, and the early majority of NFT adoption (and acceptance by broader audiences) has not yet occurred. Included in this group are photography collectors from the more traditional sphere along with museums and art consultancy firms who still remain on the sidelines of this manic marketplace. As we speak there are foundations being put into place that offer inroads for mass adoption. The next generation of NFT marketplaces will accept credit cards, for example. The much-anticipated Coinbase NFT market promises to introduce millions of potential new collectors. General public acceptance of NFTs as a collectable asset seems to be on the horizon.

We can only speculate on how a larger collecting body may affect the photography market, and whether or not the proportion of new photographers to new collectors will widen or narrow. However in thinking long term, what do you hope your collection looks like in one year, 5 years, or 10 years? Are your collecting practice designed to sustain in the long-run? If you plan to sell your collection down the road, would you try to do so piece meal, or as a single offering? And are you considering the long-term identity of your collection? Is there a particular vision or philosophy you hope to become known for as a collector?

Bookshelf

Book of the Week: Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Ways of Seeing originated as a TV series by English art critic, John Berger, and was later adapted to a book that has become widely recognized for its deep insights into the hidden meanings of pictures. Published 50 years ago, the insights of Berger’s views on art and photography have become deeply entrenched in contemporary visual discourse, and provide an entry way for new audiences of art to look beyond the surfaces of pictures, and into their depths of meaning and purpose.

Included in Berger’s insights are the social and political ideas that underpin much of Western art, perspectives on the traditions of the female nude (introducing the concept of the “male gaze”), and revolutionary ideas into the nature of seeing. The legacy of the book is one that is a hallmark of how to decode visual language and, in some respects, how to scrutinize the messages that are encoded into visual aesthetics.