Snapshot
Collection Spotlight
Margaret Murphy - I Could Look at You All Day
The Latest
Assembly
Utility Podcast
Fellowship
Quantum
Murmurs from the PhotoVerse
Visual branding in artistic practice
The materiality of photography as an NFT
Collector’s Corner
Marketability vs. Experimentation
Collection Spotlight
Margaret Murphy - I Could Look at You All Day
Los Angeles-based photographer Margaret Murphy has just released a new collection titled I Could Look at You All Day. The series is a follow-up to Murphy’s Quantum drop this past fall, which was a group collection of three artists curated in partnership with Der Grief titled TMRW (Tomorrow).
I Could Look at You All Day is a self-portrait and still life series that Murphy uses to explore ideas of self-perception within the context of social media. And throughout the 20-piece collection, we as viewers are exposed to intimate portrayals of the self while being challenged to re-consider expectations of femininity.
The resulting images, in reference to the series title, might be considered as a way for the artist to look back at the viewer and dare audiences to reflect on their own biases of gaze and perception in relation to how women should be represented.
Murphy’s self-portraits range from expressions that aggrandize her own body to gestures of the grotesque while encapsulating subtle and subversive metaphors of male expectation and desire throughout the pictures. These metaphors are wrapped within a larger visual bluntness that is direct and daring in equal measures.
Murphy as made her work available via auction format on OpenSea, with reserve prices set to .25 ETH, which represents a relative bargin compared to the .69 ETH secondary floor for her previous Quantum drop.
View I Could Look at You All Day here
The Latest
Assembly
Assembly’s latest drop is by documentary photographer Doug Dubois with a project titled My Last Day at Seventeen. The collection, shot over five years, explores the lives of teenagers coming of age in a small town on Ireland’s Southwest coast. Dubois’ work is widely recognized and is held in collections at Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA, LACMA, and many others.
View My Last Day at Seventeen here
Utility Podcast
Big Hugs Utility Podcast, hosted by Jeff Excell and BtheMouth, opened a new photographer interview series this week. They kicked the series off with surrealist photographer Ben Zank. Over the course of an hour-long conversation, Zank discussed his background and practice, addressed issues of toxic positivity within the NFT community, and the evolution of pricing for his work.
Fellowship
Fellowship made a major announcement this week in teasing out that the platform is onboarding ten widely celebrated photographers into the NFT ecosystem
While details haven’t yet been released, each of these photographers have been widely collected and exhibited in the TradArt, and have produced work considered to be enormously influential to more recent generations of photographers. The venture signals that Fellowship aims to bridge the gap between the Web2 and Web3 worlds of photography.
Quantum
Quantum’s latest community collection is titled Let it Go by photographer Norma Cordova. The series utilizes Modernist and surrealist strategies to encircle ideas of female representation, desire, and freedom from expectation. Cordova’s work has previously been published in The New York Times, VICE, PDN, and Lenscratch.
Murmurs from the Photoverse
Visual branding in artistic practice
Funghibull released a poll this week asking artists about the pressure they feel in maintining a singular artistic voice for the sake of marketability. It was followed-up by asking collectors about their willingness to collect work that ventured away from what a given artist was known for.
The materiality of photography as an NFT
Fernando Gallegos, writing for Fellowship, continues his examinations of the nature of photography as an NFT. Throughout the thread Gallegos offers great insights about photography’s material history and what it means for the medium to live natively within the screen.
Collector’s Corner
Marketability vs. Experimentation
Funghibull’s inquiry about artists feeling pressure to maintain an established style has us thinking about the dichotomy between marketability and experimentation in artist’s practices.
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