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. 

jeffexcell @jeffexcell

Talking about how to go from selling a a photo for .1 ETH to 10 Eth was my favorite part of the interview with @ben_zank Editing, hard work, and self curation. the utility podcast - Ben Zank - Interview Series, 01Our first episode in this series of Interviews is featuring Ben Zank a fantastic photographer and human.The Utility Podcast is brought to you by - Big Hugs S...youtu.be

July 13th 2022

4 Retweets50 Likes

Fellowship

Fellowship made a major announcement this week in teasing out that the platform is onboarding ten widely celebrated photographers into the NFT ecosystem

Fellowship @fellowshiptrust

5/Welcome to Web3 Laurie Simmons Guy Bourdin Joel Meyerowitz Hank Willis Thomas Pieter Hugo Joel Sternfeld Katy Grannan László Moholy-Nagy Mitch Epstein Gregory Crewdson

July 15th 2022

1 Retweet19 Likes

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.

View Let it Go here

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.

funghibull @funghibull

Questions for artists in the NFT space: 1 - Do you feel pressure or confined in any way to maintain a certain aesthetic or stick to the medium you’re best known for?

July 10th 2022

10 Retweets63 Likes

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.

Fellowship @fellowshiptrust

Looking for the code of what makes 📷Photography NFT an NFT 💾 A 🧵 from our curator @gallegosfer Most artistic disciplines are fixed to a specific medium with slight flexibility. Photography is different in that regard (Pieter Hugo, Emeka, motorcyclist and Abdullahi Ahmadu)

July 10th 2022

9 Retweets37 Likes

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.