Snapshot

Drop of the Week

• Mitch Dobrowner

The Big News

• Foundation Closes Minting to Shared Contract

Who We’re Tracking This Week

• RawDAO

• Obscura

• Untitled DAO

• NFTPhotographers

• Roger Ballen

• Fellowship

Photographer of the Week

• Claudia Pawlak

Collector’s Corner

• On Collecting, Pt. 4 - Scarcity

Drop of the Week

Mitch Dobrowner - Storms

Storm-chasing photographer Mitch Dobrowner dropped a 75-piece collection of his work with Quantum this week. The photographer has been producing such work since 2009, and attributes Ansel Adams as an inspiration for his approach to the finely-tuned craft of tonal arrangements while capturing landscape views interrupted by hurricanes, monsoons, tornados, and other severe weather conditions. Dobrowner has been published widely by magazines such as National Geographic and Time Magazine.

The Big News

Foundation Closes Minting to Shared Contract

Foundation announced this week it is closing minting to its shared smart contract for creators, moving to a model of requiring artists to mint with their own smart contracts. It’s an interesting decision that is noble-minded in its encouragement of artists holding full control of their work, yet may leave some artists scrambling to understand how smart contracts work, how they can create their own, and how the costs of establishing a smart contract may affect their minting decisions. Of course, for photographers the issue is particularly pertinent, as the release of full photography NFT collections have become privileged in the market over the minting of single images. 

The announcement also creates a question of what may happen to the visibility of work that was previously minted on Foundation’s shared contract, as collections have become standard homepage material for the platform. There are also concerns among artists that implementing their own smart contracts creates another technical and financial hurdle to achieve presence in the NFT market. 

Still, we expect to see growth in the advocacy for artist-owned smart contracts as best practice for this nascent space. With new sales platforms emerging, artists who own their own contracts gain the ability to list their work on any open marketplace. Platforms like Manifold and CXIP Labs provide tools for artists to create and deploy their own contracts.

Who We’re Tracking This Week

RawDAO

This week RawDAO announced the acquisition of work by two photographers well known in the traditional art photo world, Matthew Porter and Julie Blackmon. Porter entered the space back in October with his iconic series of flying car photographs titled, The Heights. Blackmon’s Homegrown series, which was dropped by Quantum in late November,  has been recognized for years as a unique portrayal of domestic life, using inspirations from theater and Old Master painting to inform her approach to image making. 

Obscura

Obscura just announced the next phase of its WHO WE ARE project, which comes in the form of partnership with Vellum LA, a NFT-backed digital art gallery based in Los Angeles. This initiative builds on the initial 200-piece collection of community portraits listed on Foundation, and offers 50 images from the project that will be accompanied by an outdoor exhibition on LED billboards throughout LA. The 50-piece collection can be found on OpenSea.

Untitled DAO

A group of Untitled members held their first Twitter Spaces this week to provide insight into their operations and answer questions from the community. Last week the group announced their origin collection of 15 NFT photographers, and they are now moving into a new collection procedure which pairs artist and collector members to collaborate on new acquisitions. With relatively small membership the DAO will be moving at a slow but steady pace in its activities. 

NFTPhotographers

NFTPhotographers held its first weekly Spaces talk this week, providing insight into it’s curation process and providing a chance for the community to ask questions. The platform recently announced that it has completed its first curatorial mission, selecting 109 photographers from over 900 submissions to be listed on its platform. NFTPhotographers is taking shape as part talent directory, part social hub, and a space for collectors to search through photographers in the space through use of filtering and keywording. 

Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen is among the most unique voices in contemporary photography, renowned for his career of blending theatricality and macabre subject matter in his instantly identifiable practice. He's now coming to the metaverse with an upcoming drop of a series of work called Roger the Rat. 

The artist announced the upcoming launch of his NFT collection on Instagram, and while details of the drop haven’t been released, there’s a sign-up form for collectors to receive advanced notice on the project. 

Fellowship

We’re privy to some info that Fellowship has a major project they’ll be unveiling soon, and one that may be considered historical in more ways than one, but that’s all we can say for now. 

3 Questions with Claudia Pawlak

Canadian photographer Claudia Pawlak is among the pioneering photographers in the web3 space, arriving in early 2021, long before the communities and cultures for NFT photography began to form. Pawlak’s work in the space to date might be described as intimate, sincere, and beautifully crafted work that reflects emotional responses within her environments. She is a Founding Member of RawDAO, an Obscura Foundry Grant recipient, and the Founder of Frame11, a women-focused photography gallery in Cryptovoxels.

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

CP: Growing up in Kingston, Ontario, to two Polish immigrant parents, my practice early on became very much about documenting the family dynamic. As I grew older I felt the camera was the only medium that could accurately express my thoughts and feelings, creating my own language. My interest in image making inspired me to complete a B.F.A. in Photography in 2019, and it has been a huge part of my life ever since. 

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

CP: The works of other artists most inspire me, most notably LaToya Ruby Frazier's "The Notion of Family". Artist Michelle Pearson Clarke once spoke about an "aura" that is felt when photographing, an energy that pulls us as image makers to create a photograph of a subject, at a particular time and place. Those words resonated with me in that I am very much led by an aura when making my own images. I hope that audiences can feel that energy when looking at my images, and carry it on in their own practices. 

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

CP: Serce Matki (Mother's Heart) is my most recent body of work. The work navigates my relationship with my mother as I look through her material objects such as letters, documents, and found imagery, trying to construct her identity in material objects. 

Collector’s Corner

On Collecting Photography NFTs

This is the fourth of a multi-part series exploring what it means to collect NFT photography. In week 1, we covered the topic of rarity. In week 2, we discussed provenance & ownership. In week 3 we talked about Condition and Archivability. This week we’ll talk about scarcity.

Pt. 4: Scarcity

Traditional mechanisms of collecting photography have long been guided by the medium’s natural inclination for reproduction. Digital files and film negatives provide allowance for limitless production of prints, which has led to the historical norm of photographic art being produced in editions, typically in the range of 5-50 prints per image. This standard of artist inventory has its pros and cons, but in general has created a relatively depressed valuation for photographic work in relation to other disciplines like painting and sculpture, which historically have achieved far higher prices at auction in relation to comparatively desired photographic work.

Now, in Web3, the market value for photography is changing before our eyes. Even though NFT photographs can be minted in multiple editions, the market in 2021 has largely standardized the issuance of photographs as one-of-a-kind NFTs, providing the photography a quality of rarity which is new to its historical market presence. 

What will be worth watching as we move forward into this space is how valuations of photographs will maintain their present values as more and more photographers begin to enter the space. Will the competition among artists begin to devalue 1/1 photographs? Will the market dynamics set by NFTs filter back into the IRL world of print collecting, to the point where print prices reflect the values achieved by their NFT counterparts? Will the standardization of NFTs in photographer’s practices create demand for 1/1 prints, eschewing the traditions of printing in multiples? We’re eager to see how the blockchain and IRL photo worlds continue to influence one another as we move forward.