Snapshot

Notable Drops

• Alec Soth

• David Brandon Geeting

The Latest

• Ukranian Women’s Photographer Organization

• Imag3Aid

• Assembly

• Fellowship

• Obscura

• Quantum

• Art3

Photographer of the Week

• Simon Roberts

Collector’s Corner

• How to Sustain Collections (and Budgets)

Notable Drops

Alec Soth - Dog Days Bogota

Alec Soth’s world-renowned work came to the blockchain in partnership with Assembly last week. Soth released a project titled Dog Days Bogota, a documentary series produced in two months while awaiting legal proceedings to clear for his adoption of his child in Bogota, Columbia.

Dog Days Bogota

David Brandon Geeting - Amusement Park

David Brandon Geeting is widely known for his unique personal voice when it comes to still life photography. His anything-goes attitude is on full display in his Amusement Park drop. Supported by Fellowship, Amusement Park uses form, color, and juxtaposition in endlessly surprising ways. 

Amusement Park

The Latest

Ukranian Women’s Photographer Organization

A pop-up collection of female photographers in Ukraine has come together to release a collection on OpenSea in an effort to raise funds to support Ukrainians. The collection features the work of close to 50 Ukrainian women, and all funds raised are pledged for urgent needs of Ukrainians in hot spots, including medicines, food, and support for orphanages and animal shelters.

Ukranian Women’s Photographer Organization

Imag3Aid

Imag3Aid is a fundraising initiative designed to leverage the photography community to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians. The group is in the midst of organizing now, and have just started up their Twitter account to provide updates on their progress.

The aim is to gather the work of 50 prominent photographers from the NFT space, with all primary sales and royalties being donated to various 501c3 charities providing aid to Ukranians in areas of healthcare, nutrition, and more.

Assembly

After the aforementioned Alex Soth drop that occurred last week, Assembly announced it is releasing a collection by photographer Barry Stone titled /CLOUD/. The collection is  a 20-image series inspired by a well-known series of cloud photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. Stone makes his ‘clouds’  by rearranging image data code, allowing for random chance to create new and unpredictable iterations of cloud imagery. The drop is slated for March 9th.

Fellowship

Fellowship is looking ahead to it’s next drop by Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. The photographer’s work charts the coming-of-age of two young cousins in a rural area outside of Buenos Aires. Sanguinetti’s portraits of the two girls are rich with magical realism and theatricality, and the work, shot over the span of many years, illustrates how the two girls move from adolescence into adulthood. The collection is expected to release on March 18th.

Obscura

Obscura announced the formation of an Emergency Reporting Commission this week to assist photojournalists in Ukraine to document activities on the ground. In its statement on Mirror, the initiative is designd to “directly fund independent professionals that are committed to reporting form the field [during moments of conflict]”

The first recipient of the grant is Lorenzo Meloni, who has been photographing and minting images on a daily basis while writing of his experiences here.

Quantum

Quantum is gearing up for it’s next Community Curated drop, featuring colorful and vaudevillian portraiture by Parker Day titled ICONS. The collection is comprised of 200 images, and will release on March 14th as a dutch auction starting at 1 Eth.

The platform also shared news about its upcoming Quantum Key offering. Owners of they key are promised several benefits, including exclusive access to mints, live events, and private chat channels for owners.

Along with this comes news that the team is building a physical gallery location in Los Angeles called Quantum Space LA, which will feature a minting center, virtual screens, a ‘metaverse immersion room’, and other experiences.

Art3

Art3 has announced its first one-person curated drop by British photographer James Mollison titled James & Other Apes. The drop is a collection of portraits of great apes photographed in ape sanctuaries and in the wild. The images are produced in the style of passport photographs, and depict detailed facial renderings of gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and other species. The collection is slated to drop on March 29th.

Photographer of the Week: Simon Roberts

British photographer Simon Roberts is widely recognized for his large-format, tableaux photographs of teh British landscape. He has exhibited widely, and his work resides in multiple major public collections, including Eastman Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Deutsche Borse Art Collection. Roberts’ genesis drop, Polyarnye Nochi, visualizes arctic regions of Russia where the sun rarely is seen during winter months.

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

Simon Roberts: I’ve been working with the photographic medium for just over twenty-five years now. I’m mostly self-taught, having initially studied a BA Hons degree in the social sciences before undertaking a career in photography. After a brief period working within editorial photography I’ve spent most of the past two decades dedicated to long-term self-generated projects examining contemporary social, economic and political issues, exhibiting the work and publishing books.

I mostly shoot with a large-format camera photographing from an elevated perspective (often from the roof of my motorhome) in an effort to create expansive, tableaux images, which chart our relationship to the human landscape.

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

SR: Over the years my work has looked to balance the depiction of formal beauty with the desire to record and question humanity’s presence and intervention in the landscape, whilst also challenging pre-conceived conventions and ideas. In particular, I see the concept of landscape as a contested, ambiguous space, shaped not only by material and environmental factors, but by fantasy and politics, economics and history.

I’m inspired by art, literature, film but also in the fact that as individual images makers we all have our own unique biography and stance, thereby bringing a unique perspective to the subjects we are trying to represent. There are always new ways to tell familiar stories!

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

SR: Winter in Arctic Russia finds a region shrouded in near darkness, a meteorological phenomenon known as Polyarnye Nochi (Polar Nights). Between December and mid-January, the sun remains below the horizon and there is only a faint glow of light visible around midday. It is perhaps miraculous that Soviet factories, apartments, and entire cities were constructed in what should be a deserted wasteland.

Man’s ingenuity in the face of nature’s might is one aspect of these photographs but they are also studies of the way in which winter is able to consume, transform and often beautify the man-made world.

Looking at these photographs now, with the appalling crisis unfolding in Ukraine is challenging. Several of these images were made around the military port of Murmansk, a town which will no doubt be playing its part in Russia’s egregious war effort.

View Simon Roberts’ Polyarnye Nochi collection here

Collector’s Corner

How to Sustain Collections (and Budgets)

With changing market dynamics in the photography space and many new artists entering the fray, we are entering a new phase of collecting in which following a thesis of “collect what you love’ can be difficult to sustain. We are still in the early phase of Web3, and many tremendous artists have yet to enter they fray.

As the NFT market continues to expand at a rapid clip, collectors will be foreced to become more discerning when it comes to what they buy, which means setting rules, being focused, and maintaining discipline in order to develop a sustained, meaningful collection.

What kinds of factors go into play when deciding what to collect, and how can constraints be built around these factors? Let’s dive in.

First, maintaining a budget is vital, be it weekly, monthly, or a cap on how much to spend per piece or per artist. A disciplined budget acts as a buffer against FOMO, and helps to de-risk investment decisions that may be made in the spur-of-the-moment.

Second, consider thematic collections, be it by subject matter, aesthetic identity, mood, etc… What do you want the identity of your collection to be? Setting a personal curatorial framework can narrow the scope of a collection, but also create a body of images that stand together as focused and meaningful. Strict curation is another way of narrowing market options to ensure your collecting activities are laser focused.

Third, what type of artist are you looking to collect? Do you aim to support emerging photographers, or do you stick to recognized names? Do you collection from independent artists, or those channeled through curated platforms?

Whatever your collector profile may be, know that long-term thinking and planning will always lead to a more sustained success. As new and exciting photographers continue to migrate into the NFT ecosystem, it’s important to step back and consider just what your collecting goals are. Doing this can help you sustain for years to come.