Issue 110 | April 8 - April 22, 2022

This is my longest editor’s note yet -  if you want to skip past the journey that led me to write this essay, and go right to what I learned about photography and NFTs, click here.

Reflections on NFTs and Photography

I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what? - Charles Bukowski

By nature, I’m nothing like Charles Bukowski. I try to be optimistic and generous in my outlook toward the world. I want to believe each new day offers us new opportunities and chances to begin again. I try to believe that however dark any current moment is or feels, in time light will return. 

This optimism is reflected in my photography practice. Every time I walk out the door, camera in hand, I am genuinely excited about the possibilities the world offers and hopeful about the pictures I might find. 

Over the past winter, though, I found something had changed and my innate optimism was waning. Maybe it was the complete craziness of the last six years from Trump to Q-Anon to the endless pandemic, but I began to find myself less amused by Bukowski's quote, and more nodding along in silent agreement, like, Boy oh boy, did that guy get it right. 

The endless lies, bad news, weird cult-like behavior, and divisive rhetoric of our era had begun to grind me down. I wondered if the best way to manage one’s own sanity and ability to contribute positively in times of great uncertainty and danger like ours is to just walk away, and focus most of one’s energies on the things you really care about and know are important. A monastic approach to the chaos and disruptions of our time.

I can’t ignore or walk away from the dangerous right-wing politics that have taken hold in America and elsewhere - the stakes are too high, but I had hoped I could walk away from some of our era’s cultural and art world excesses and absurdities.

So last year when I read an odd story about a guy named ‘Beeple’ who sold a jpeg that consisted of 5000 daily drawings he made over 14 years as an ‘NFT’ for 69 million dollars I thought, “Hmmm…that seems really crazy, but oh well, lifestyles of the rich and famous, who cares?”

It turns out that a lot of people care when an artist most people had never heard of makes a 69 million dollar sale using an unfamiliar technology. And while NFTs had existed as a viable tech since 2014 when a proof of concept demonstration was presented at a hacker conference, it was Beeple’s March 2021 sale, seven years later, that was the cultural defining moment that had many people asking, ‘WTF is an NFT?’

It’s not an easy question to answer, and as I explored the question over several months, I’ve come to believe that the difficulty of answering that question is one of many problems with the technology.  You ought to be able to understand the basics and the benefits of new technology without the hours of research I put into it. 

But a year ago? When Beeple made the big sale? It was just another development I was happy to ignore. Vaccines had at long last arrived and I was just excited to safely re-engage with the real world, make photographs and interact in person with the photography community I’ve come to love.

It wasn’t until late fall 2021 when cooler weather and the Omicron wave of the pandemic hit NYC, and I once again started spending less time outside making photos and more time working indoors that I began to realize how quickly and deeply NFTs as a cultural and economic phenomenon had infiltrated the online photography community, and just from a vibe perspective, this new impossible-to-ignore presence mostly struck me as mostly…annoying. The trickle, then torrent of NFT hype gave me a strong Bukowskian, “Jesus Christ, now what?” feeling.

On Twitter, where I spend most of my online time, it felt like a cult had taken over a large cross-section of photographers. People who once had their real names as Twitter handles like @JaneEdwards now had @JaneEdwards.eth as their handle - eth being Ethereum, the cryptocurrency used in most NFT transactions. While making art and personal expression had once been the primary motivation for many of these photographers, it felt like for at least the time being, money, in the form of cryptocurrencies, had become their fundamental driver, so fundamental it had become part of their name and online identity. 

Another sign of NFT’s overnight success in online photo circles was the seemingly unending stream of tweets from photographers that went something along the lines of “GM people, so happy to announce I’m dropping my first NFT collection on @OpenSea Friday 🚀🌖” It sounded so painfully cringey and dumb to me, both the endlessly echoed ‘gm’ greetings as they promoted their own or their friends NFTs, and the idea of ‘dropping’ their ‘new collection’ as if NFTs had transformed these photographers into pop stars dropping their latest single.

But really, who did I think I was criticizing in-group language or slang? Over the years I’m sure I’ve amassed a large and annoying vocabulary of in-group ‘artspeak’ language that feels almost designed to intimidate or alienate art world outsiders. On the other hand, the language around NFTs often combined artspeak with the worst technobabble and techno hype into a uniquely unpleasant and alienating language stew. 

Still, I continued to ignore the NFT trend hoping it would pass. It wasn’t until I began seeing photographers I genuinely respected talking about ‘NFT photos’ and ‘NFT photography’ that I realized that A) Damn this crap isn’t going away and B) I had to figure out my negative feelings around this new phenomenon and understand what NFTs were about as opposed to reacting so instinctually.

Was ‘NFT photography’ really a thing?

"It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar."  -Anaïs Nin

Had the past years made me into someone whose insecurities about a rapidly changing world provoked an unjustified hostility towards an exciting new development? Maybe. After all, I was told, ‘respectable’ and ‘serious’ artists were doing ‘interesting things’ in the ‘NFT space’. 

It was time to dig in and find out if my feelings were emerging from common sense or just fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  What were these interesting things the artists were doing? All I saw any way I looked was an old-fashioned gold rush.

The first thing I learned is that exploring the world of NFTs really is a descent down a very deep rabbit hole, and there’s no easy way to grasp the ins and outs of this world without learning about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, Web 3.0, smart contracts, digital scarcity, exchanges, wallets, gas, minting, platforms, decentralized finance, proof of work, proof of stake, DAOs and much more.

I think the complexity of the space is surprisingly one of its main attractions - to scammers who exploit the complexity to take advantage of people and to enthusiasts or even critics who enjoy learning about a big complicated new thing in the world with lots of nooks and crannies and weirdness and surprises and dangers. I imagine gamers find a familiar pleasure in mapping the territory and solving the puzzles of this new space. 

But fear not, I learned as much as I could about all that junk so you don’t have to. From here on, I just want to summarize some of what I learned about NFTs, the relationship between NFTs and photography, some flaws and problems with the technology, and some possible beneficial use cases I see for the tech now or in the future.  This world of NFTs is far larger than its relationship to photography, but the relationship between NFTs and photography is where I am going to try and hold focus. 

This stuff is complicated with many different people designing many different ways of doing things and I’m aware of some exceptions and contradictions to what I’m laying out.  However, I think it’s fair to say that my descriptions and definitions accurately describe the most common actions and transactions, and understandings of the space.

WHAT I LEARNED AND WHAT I THINK ABOUT IT

1. What are NFTs? NFTs are a name for unique digital files. NFT people think of these unique digital files as ‘digital objects.’ I think of them more as digital products, an arranged marriage of code and a digital file you create, like a jpeg. The code that makes your jpeg unique and can give your jpeg new properties is not literally attached to your jpeg. The NFT code has a link to metadata which in turn holds a link to your jpeg. The record of this union between the unique NFT code and your jpeg is registered to a blockchain.

2. What is a blockchain? It’s an append-only decentralized public database.  That means you can only add information to the database like you add a link to an existing chain. Everything that’s been written into the database already is there forever, immutable. Unchangeable. Permanent. There is no person or entity who could delete something from this database. This is by design. Since when have chains ever been a good idea? Restaurant chains? The worst food. Retail chains? Cheap and awful. Dogs on chains? Cruel. Humans on chains? Immeasurably cruel. Why would you want to put your artwork on chains? In my years in photography, I’ve made and proudly shared so many photographs I now find terrible or even problematic. I’m no Tyler Mitchell who seems to have made amazing photographs from the day he picked up a camera. I love the fact that as I’ve become a better photographer, and see more clearly what I wish to express with my work and what I don’t want to express, I can easily delete old photographs that no longer reflect my current vision.  I look forward to deleting this essay in shame at some future date. By the way, I have no tattoos.  I suppose if your body is covered with tattoos of the names of past romantic partners you might be more comfortable adding your work to an immutable public ledger. 

3. Jeez, what if someone steals my photography and mints it as an NFT? If it’s on an immutable database does the thief have possession and can make money off my artwork forever? Well, remember - the NFT is not your jpeg. Some people like to conflate the two as if they’re one thing, an ‘NFT Photo’ but they’re not.  The NFT code which contains links to your artwork is on the blockchain forever, but not the actual artwork, your jpeg. Your jpeg is hosted elsewhere else and can, in most cases, be removed or taken down from at least the most popular public-facing NFT marketplaces if someone were to steal it. I think it’s really important to keep this in mind.  An NFT is not a jpeg. A jpeg is not an NFT. If they were the same (and they actually could be a single unit if it wasn’t cost-prohibitive) many of the problems of NFTs would be even worse than they already are. 

4. You brought up tattoos. Can NFTs be unminted like tattoos can be removed by lasers? As a creator, you can mint an NFT that specifies that you hold the right to ‘burn’ it at some future date. But as a collector, would you buy something that the creator could destroy at some future date? Sure, People buy anything. I wonder how many photographers include these provisions in their smart contracts. There are positive cases too like your smart contract could say that you can burn the NFT at a future date, but you will replace the burnt NFT with a new and different one or even a physical object.  

5. What’s a smart contract? This is one of the real superpowers of an NFT. It’s a contract in code that is executed automatically every time your NFT is bought or sold (providing it’s bought and sold within a closed platform like OpenSea, or a set of platforms operating under similar rules) and it can contain an infinite variety of provisions. A lot of people are most excited by the idea of royalties. Meaning not only do you make cryptocurrency the first time your NFT is sold, but you get a percentage of crypto on all future sales on the NFTs as well.

6. Crypto? Yes, crypto - cryptocurrency. This is one of the big problems with NFTs. You don’t create or buy or sell NFTs with money like US dollars. All transactions are made in cryptocurrencies, most commonly Ethereum (eth). You have to convert your regular money into Ethereum. When people argue about the environmental costs of NFTs, this is what they’re talking about.  The environmental costs all stem from the use of cryptocurrencies. Are the existing environmental costs real? Alejandro Cartagena, one of NFT’s biggest promoters in the photo world, recently dismissed these concerns as “mean reporting” and “misinformation” generated by “creators of hate”. Just to be crystal clear on this issue: Alejandro Cartagena is wrong, and grossly self-interested in his dismissal and downplaying of these concerns. There are genuine and unacceptable environmental costs to NFTs in their most commonly transacted form (using Eth as the cryptocurrency foundation).  A few days ago, on April 4, 2022, the UN warned us in their latest report that earth was “firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” The current two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both pushing us down that track towards an unlivable world even faster.  That is indisputable and concerns about these environmental costs ought not to be trivialized. If you are creating an NFT-based project designed to help the environment using a proof-of-work-based cryptocurrency to fund or sell it, you are part of our current environmental catastrophe, not a part of a solution to reverse or pause it.

7. Well, that sucks.  Isn’t there a way to do this thing in a more environmentally sustainable way? Yes. There are existing crypto blockchains that are far better for the environment. Their main problem is they lack the popularity of Ethereum, and so one limits whatever chances one has to sell NFTs in these far smaller marketplaces. 

8. I heard Ethereum might get super environmentally friendly soon? Yes, that’s the hope and the plan.  These plans have been in the works for more than six years. Maybe it will now happen on schedule (in the next several months), maybe it won’t. I think people ought to reconsider minting, buying, or selling eth-based NFTs until Ethereum actually achieves its environmentally-friendly goals, or play around with NFTs on more environmentally friendly blockchains just to get the hang of this whole game until Ethereum achieves its goals. If NFTs are even close to the paradigm-shifting technology their promoters claim, we’re still in early days and you have plenty of time to get involved as an early adopter.

9. Any other problems or issues with the cryptocurrency foundation of NFTs beyond environmental harm? Many. Their potential to cause harm to our existing economy and financial structures (a stated goal of many backers of these currencies), their innate speculative nature (their value rises and falls much more often and dramatically than government-backed currencies), and their unique role in facilitating cybercrimes are some of the issues that get most talked about, but there are others.

10. Let’s get back to basics. I’m a photographer. I still don’t really get the point of NFTs Can you explain it better? For photographers, I think NFTs are (at least for now) mostly an exciting new way to sell their photographs. OpenSea, the dominant platform for buying and selling NFTs is a new marketplace and a new audience for your photos just as eBay was a new marketplace for collectibles when it was introduced or Etsy was a new marketplace for crafts. Because of the crypto foundation NFTs are built on, there is a new audience for your work, with cryptocurrency to spend, and few places to spend it. Some of those people love collecting NFTs linked to photographs. Many photographers who are ‘all in’ on this space also really enjoy and have benefited from the communities of creators and supporters they’ve found and joined. I think community, by itself, ought not to be seen as virtue enough to justify some of the harms and potential for harms that accompany NFTs.  Supporters of Q-Anon are often quoted as celebrating the community they’ve found with fellow believers of that batshit conspiracy theory. Same for anti-vaxxers. The value of any given community is not automatically neutral. But having a new marketplace to sell one’s work, and at least a chance at making some real old-fashioned money selling in these new marketplaces is an incredibly attractive proposition to artists and photographers struggling to eke out a living. To the degree this tech helps everyday photographers make money who have been unable to break into traditional markets for photography like galleries or magazines or commissions, I celebrate NFTs. Unfortunately, the photographers who are best positioned to make money in NFTs are photographers who have already been given the imprimatur and acceptance of the traditional art world, are already accepted by traditional gatekeepers for photography, or are getting into the NFT space with existing large social media followings. And some of the brand new platforms or NFT-based organizations that have been most successful are just going to be new and different gatekeepers. They’re still going to keep the vast majority of people, however talented, out. That’s how they will ensure value for those they let in. Of course, there will always be a class of photographers who may never have succeeded in the traditional photo world but will succeed on these new platforms by virtue of something in their style or subject matter that fits perfectly with this new tech world. Will that be you? Maybe. Whoever it is, I suspect this class will not be large or more inclusive than existing routes for success in pre-NFT photography.

11. So you don’t see NFTs as being a new tech or new medium for photography like digital cameras were when they were introduced? No. NFTs are not a new tech or new medium in photography. The value proposition of digital cameras for photography was clear the day they were introduced.  From that point on, you did not need to use expensive film or expensive film processing or work with the limitations of film (i.e. limited number of photos in a roll). Images would now be captured electronically and transmitted directly from cameras to computers where they could be processed digitally. Images were still being captured by cameras and lenses and light-sensitive materials, but the light-sensitive materials were electronic sensors, not film.  NFTs do not improve photography in any discernable way as far as I can tell. An NFT is code that helps you sell your jpeg.  It does not create your jpeg or materially affect your photo. To this day, I haven’t heard any NFT enthusiasts articulate a clear use case for NFTs to improve or materially change photography beyond NFT's proven ability to sell and obtain crypto value from your jpegs (which can help you make a living or create a new funding stream for your work - non-trivial benefits that will influence new photography that is created)

12. Won’t photographers develop new styles of images that are optimized for presentation and sale on NFT marketplace platforms? Yes, just as some photographers make photographs optimized to stand out and garner likes and comments on social media platforms like Instagram. I’m sure some photographers who want to sell their work on these new platforms will begin to optimize their photos for the platform, making their photos most like the photos that seem to sell the best to these new audiences. This does not make these sales platforms cameras. It just means NFTs and platforms for buying and selling NFTs are one of a myriad of contemporary influences on photography. I believe linking a photograph’s value so explicitly to its speculative value in cryptocurrencies will inevitably diminish its worth as an artistic expression of humanity.

13. There have to be some positive use cases beyond buying and selling that make the NFT space worthwhile to get into. It can’t be all about money. Serious artists are involved! Like Alec Soth and Gregory Halpern. Maybe someday. But for now, it’s all about money no matter what anyone tells you, and well-known artists, thanks to their existing success in the photo world, are well-positioned to earn a lot of money selling NFTs of their old pre-NFT work. If money or the possibility of making money was a non-existent incentive, I’m confident the photography community’s interest in NFTs would be close to non-existent. But anyway here’s a positive use case I found recently.  Let’s imagine you loved Gregory Halpern's pictures you saw excerpted from his photo book ZZYZX, but you couldn’t afford the book. If Halpern posted the photos on Instagram, they’d be tiny files that aren’t really useful to learn from. But since he’s minted NFTs attached to super high-resolution versions of many if not all of the jpegs from that book to OpenSea, you can look up the project, and you can go right now and right-click to download incredible high-resolution versions of the photographs directly to your computer to study. So there is an educational value you might be able to extract from some NFTs, a value you might not even find in a poorly printed book of the artist’s work. But as an artist, do you want to make super-high-resolution un-watermarked digital versions of your work freely available to everyone? When NFTs were first invented back in 2014, one of the main use cases suggested was to establish provenance for digital artworks. So if I mint an NFT of my photo, and the first version of the NFT is attached to my name, that NFT can now be bought and sold a million times and it will be easy to establish that this unique NFT can be linked back to me as a creator.  I do think that’s a valuable use case, but the world of photographers who would have faced questions of provenance as one of their pre-NFT problems has to be incredibly small. All, or almost all, problems NFTs claim to have solved for photography were already solved well enough by existing, if often ignored, systems like copyright or contract law around licensing images or public archives. Even things like future royalties. Even things like funding large photography projects. Even things like adding informative and dynamic metadata to online archives of photographs. One benefit of NFTs is that they remind us these old-fashioned means of creating value from your photographs are still possible in the real world and may even be more robust. (If you were an artist who made wholly digital artwork like computer-generated moving graphics, digital creations that never had a physical real-world counterpart, I think the use case for NFTs has always been much stronger).

14. What about the Metaverse? Isn’t that a natural home for NFTs, and an enormous new potential marketplace for NFTs of my photographs? Sure. When the metaverse becomes a widely available and widely accessible digital world, I think we’ll see a large variety of new use cases for digital artwork, including jpegs from photographers. I’ve been excited and enthusiastic about some of those developments for decades. These days, after years of seeing so much abuse and corruption and unforeseen consequences to social media I’m more apprehensive. So far the Web 3.0/metaverse rollout has not tempered my concerns, only increased them.

15. Are NFTs some horrible catastrophe for photography? No. In the big picture NFTs are still a small corner of the photo world, and their impact, for better or worse, is likely to remain small for some time. 
    

16. My head is exploding, can we give this a rest? Mine is too, yes, let’s give it a rest. If you’re hungry for more, Andy Day’s recent article in F-Stoppers offering six critiques of the tech is a concise and effective analysis of many of the things I haven’t had room to touch on, particularly in his points 4-6. If you’re on Twitter, Molly White’s @web3isgreat is an invaluable follow, as are @digiconomist and @Jacob Silverman.

Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol 

WAIT HERE ARE SOME FINAL FINAL FINAL CONCLUSIONS

I see NFTs as a cheapening influence on photography, and another way technology and unfettered capitalism divide us from one another at a time when we need mutual understanding and empathy more than ever.

NFTs push photography further away from the ineffable qualities and humanistic foundation of the artistic impulse and chain it more thoroughly and immutably than ever before to the imperatives, influences, and corruptions of speculative money and commerce. The same hedge funds and private equity whose rapacious practices are negative forces in traditional finance and politics are shaping this space and driving much of the hype here as well.

The excitement that builds around new and seemingly easy ways to make money - when existing ways of making money are often so exhausting or dispiriting or insufficient  - is a seductive siren call that is incredibly hard to resist, particularly for those living in a state of economic uncertainty. I make no judgment on the vast majority of photographers who are or might be about to dive into this new marketplace. I offer no advice, only the encouragement that they continue learning about this space and stay safe. Scams abound.

I hope well-known and influential artists, organizations, and photo community thought leaders who have rushed uncritically into this space give their efforts a second thought. NFTs and its cryptocurrency foundations are a complicated new development and I think people who are influential in the photo world have a special responsibility to learn more about the existing harms and potential for harm that exist with the tech in its current form.

I encourage anyone who is instinctively critical or on the fence to learn more about NFTs. I do think NFTs or their hopefully improved digital descendants will be with us for a while and I’ve largely enjoyed the time I’ve spent learning about them (minus the hype).  It’s a fascinating and enormous world to explore, and its creators, enthusiasts, and true believers deserve credit for making it so interesting. I imagine I’ll have more to say another time.

But for now, at last, forget about NFTs, enjoy the spring, this is one of photography’s most glorious seasons to make pictures in NYC!  Can’t wait to see all your photos!

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 110 | April 8 - April 22

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.

Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8, 2022

I’m In A Time Zone

On Sunday, March 13, at 2 am the US entered into Daylight Saving Time, and the sunset jumped from 6:00 pm the night before to a far more reasonable 7:01 pm Sunday evening.

What nobler cause could there be then to save daylight that precious resource vital to so many photographers! I welcome that one-hour loss of sleep! As someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, the day we finally enter Daylight Saving Time really feels like the beginning of happier days ahead. It’s also the unofficial ‘Opening Day’ of my outdoor picture-making season.

So I awoke Sunday morning, cheered by the time change, and started going around the apartment fixing the time on some of our old-fashioned non-internet connected clocks; the clock radio, the clock on the stove, the old-fashioned kitchen clock, the clock on my digital camera (which actually has a daylight saving setting but I’m never sure if I’ve activated it).

The clock radio in our bathroom is 11 minutes fast. Why is my bathroom in its own time zone? I believe this special bathroom time zone was established as a way of helping to ensure we wouldn’t be late for events or appointments outside the house. And after living in this special time zone for a while, I have to say, it works. Moving to the kitchen, I noticed that clock was six minutes behind. I’m not sure, but this time zone may have been established to help ensure food was not undercooked. Or it could represent the battery dying. How many time zones does my house have, anyway? As many as Russia? Did you know Russia has 11 time zones? (As if we needed more evidence of their imperial overreach).

In the contiguous United States, we have four time zones, and in 2016 I took a cross-country road trip back and forth through them all. My buddy and I drove a long, inverted arc from NYC south through New Orleans before heading north through Albuquerque and Denver, west to LA, and finally up to Seattle. On our five-week-long trip, getting to Seattle ended up taking close to four weeks. The trip back was fast, and I remember racing through the time zones as we headed back to New York. I remember having the strange realization that as we drove we’d ‘spring forward’ in time by literally springing forward through space, as opposed to time. I also remember the beauty of the glow from the setting sun illuminating endless vistas outside Bozeman, Montona; light that lasted well past 10 pm before finally extinguishing into darkness. In New York, even on the longest days, the light from the setting sun doesn’t linger much past 9 pm.

Later light in New York City has a specific resonance for me - it means that people who finish up work at 5 or 6 have an hour or two after work to hang out, unwind, and appreciate late day sunshine with their friends. Life on the street grows busier, and it’s generally accompanied by relaxed, good vibes. As someone who enjoys making candid photographs out in the world, these after-work summer hours are some of my favorite times to make photos.

Photographers make most of their work in very specific, mostly fleeting time zones of their own. For candid street photographers, a shutter speed of 1/400th of a second is often referenced as a starting point - a fast enough fraction of a second to freeze motion and get a sharp enough photo of a moment. Fine art/fashion photographer Paolo Roversi made a lot of work in the 1/4 of a second to 1 second time zones, using the resulting blurry exposures to evoke emotional responses of beauty and ephemerality.

Photographic time zones are not always so transitory. Edward Weston, made his famous photo of a green pepper in 1927 using a 4-6 hour exposure of the vegetable according to Weston’s grandson, Kim. Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto suggests that fossils are like photographs made over multi-million year exposure times:

Fossil are the result of natural cataclysms. They are created when something vibrantly alive is instantaneously extinguished and entombed by an earthquake, landslide, subsea volcanic eruption, or meteor impact. The earth and ash heaped on top of the thing stamp out the impression of its shape like a carved seal; then, over the course of tens of hundreds of millions of years, that shape becomes embedded in sedimentary layers and turns to stone. When you split the strata, the layer on top is the negative image, while the fossilized life form appears as the positive image. [via]

Recently there was a viral article in The Cut about surviving the coming vibe shift. The idea is that in the culture, things change, and some ways of being in the cultural moment feel dated if they persist past one of these vibe shifts. It was a fun kind of meaningless article that wasn’t really saying much more than things that seem cool in one moment, and uncool the next. What I got out of the article was an acknowledgment that shifts between time zones are never as sharp as we imagine. There’s always plenty of people that keep the old vibe long after the new vibe hits. Both the good old days and the bad old days are very much a part of our current days.

In general, I love the amorphous boundaries of time zones that The Cut article seemed nervous about. I love that any day I walk the streets of NYC, I can see young people rocking 1980s looks, folks driving 1970s muscle cars, or enjoying cafe life in urban neighborhoods still crowded with 19th-century buildings. I’m very attracted to these time zone anomalies as a photographer and when I see evidence of past eras in our present moment, I always grab a picture. It feels like I’m catching time travelers.

It’s getting late, so in the hopes of surviving the vibe shift that occurred over the course of time it took me to write this note, I’ll say goodbye.

Thanks for reading and I hope you all find the time you need to make pictures in the weeks ahead!

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Publisher's note: From this issue forward, the newsletter will be published bi-weekly (once every two weeks) through May 27. Over the summer, we'll aim for shorter issues once a month and then return to full issues on a bi-weekly schedule in the fall.

A note about Instagram: Instagram recently added a couple of new ways to view your Instagram feed: Following and Favorites. Following shows a chronological feed of folks you follow, and Favorites (you can have 50) shows you a chronological feed of your favorites. (You'll see the standard algorithmic feed if you haven’t selected one of these options). If you follow us on Instagram and want to make sure you're seeing the photo talks and events we’re posting before they happen, consider adding @nycphotocommunity to your favorites list.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.

Issue 108 | March 18 - 25, 2022

On Capacious Photography

I don’t know, I must have heard it on a podcast or something, but recently I found the five-dollar word “capacious,” which is a fancy way of saying ‘roomy’ or ‘spacious’ echoing around my head like an earworm I can’t get rid of. In an effort to do something useful with this situation, I’ve been thinking about what a capacious photography might be.

When I first started getting more serious about photography, my strategy for making images was the opposite of capacious, it was reductive. I tried to minimize elements in my photographs in the hopes that a reductive approach would increase the clarity of the expression I was trying to achieve. If they were portraits, I tried to find the plainest, most empty walls to serve as a backdrop for the photos. If it was something funny or interesting I saw on the street, I’d put it in the center of the viewfinder and snap a picture so that the sides of the image hold the subject in the frame (I still have this problem). Other times I would make images with the shallowest depth of field my lens had to blur out the rich complicated world that my subject existed in. I wanted to shrink the world to achieve the big hope and dreams I had for my photography.

What I realized as I became more acquainted with photography that really moved me from the greats and my peers, I began to see that their photography was successful because of all the different ways their work would try to make the pictorial space bigger and more elastic and…capacious.

Instead of two-dimensional flat images, these photographers tried to depict a three-dimensional pictorial space by layering elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background of the image. Other photographers would crop their images so that, for example, an arm from someone outside of the picture frame would come, sans body, into the picture frame, or someone inside the frame would be looking, or pointing outside the frame. Tactics like these and others would remind me, as an image viewer, that there was a big world inside and beyond the four sides of the picture frame.

Some images would hold a visual mystery, or make me wonder what, exactly, was going on in the image. These images became more spacious because they really engaged my mind, and raised questions that couldn’t really be answered. By forcing this dilemma, they made my imagination almost a part of the image as I was being encouraged to speculate on what was happening, or imagine a story that could bring meaning to the images I was viewing.

When photos were put together, in series or photobooks, that’s where I really saw a world opening up. In photography series and projects, I began to see that one could really begin to describe a subject in a much fuller way by not only giving me the precise description of individual images but by showing me that images in sequence or juxtaposition produced something more - a sum greater than the parts. To me, a successful photo series or project or book has an almost literary quality in my mind, like reading a short story.

This week’s featured photographer, Sofie Vasquez, is a great example of that. She has done a spectacular job of opening up and expanding the world of indie wrestling she is exploring in her images. She gives us portraits of the protagonists. She shows us the wrestlers in action - all of the glamour, grit, and pain of a wrestling match. She shows us fans. She shows us the wrestlers in dressing rooms, or outside the venues. In this way, and through these photos we feel like we are a fly on the wall in their world, and our imagination is activated as we wonder and want to know more, so much more about the people who are working and hustling to succeed in this world.

There are a lot of forces and incentives in play that encourage us to see the people and world we encounter through a more reductive lens. The reality is that the world, and the people in it are always always always more complex and complicated than we will ever be able to grasp. Starting from that point and trying to make pictures that allow room for as much of that complexity as we can perceive seems like a good way to go. That’s a capacious goal for a capacious photography. And that’s what I’ll aim for in the warmer and brighter months ahead.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 108 | March 18 - March 25

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

Issue 107 | March 11 - 18, 2022

Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago today, March 11, 2020, I posted the following to the NYC Photo Community Instagram account:

I’m not only a passionate photographer, but I’m passionate about the idea that in-person community is one of the secrets to thriving in any creative endeavor, such as photography.  We need each other, and together we make each other better.  So it pains me to say this, but I believe the best way I can support this community through this Coronavirus situation is to suspend promoting photo gatherings and photo events for the time being.  I trust the health experts who say the smartest way to avoid a bad outcome for our country, and those most at risk from this virus, is to hold off on non-essential gatherings and travel until we have more information, and our health system gets more prepared for the contingencies it’s already facing….Hopefully, we’ll have a better handle on the situation soon, and I can resume full operations.

I had no idea what was coming and expected things would return to normal in a month or two at most.

I started the NYC Photo Community in September of 2019, only a few months before, specifically as a way to share and promote in-person photo events around the city. My idea was to intentionally avoid online community elements in favor of simply encouraging people to get out of the house and meet fellow photographers and photography enthusiasts at photo talks, exhibitions, and meet-ups around the city. 

But then the world changed and kept changing, one dramatic event after another. 

Covid-19 began its rapid spread across the country and around the world leading to lockdowns and massive disruption of work and schools and everyday life. George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis sparking worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and social action. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died allowing Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a third supreme court justice. Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election. Effective vaccines began rolling out across the country. Insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Biden from taking power. Coronavirus variants spread across the country. Vaccine and mask protests spread across the country. The Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan following the chaotic US withdrawal from our longest war. Migrants fleeing a variety of threats continued to seek safe havens around the world. Cryptocurrencies become a trillion-dollar-plus unregulated market for speculation. Climate change continues to exacerbate floods, fires, and extreme weather events in localities around the world. 

And now here we are two years on, faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to annex its territory - a conflict the rest of the world can’t counter directly for fear of sparking a wider war or nuclear conflict.

It’s been a lot.

While we’ve all been directly impacted, the chaotic events of the last couple of years have been experienced in very different ways by different people depending on their circumstances. Healthcare and other essential workers found themselves on the front lines overnight with all of the danger, risk, and sacrifice that entailed whether they were a doctor or a cashier at a grocery store. Many people got sick, and many still struggle with long Covid symptoms. Millions of people lost loved ones. Some folks experienced tragedies or setbacks that would have been difficult any year but were particularly difficult in the midst of a pandemic.

The pain and reckoning and protests that followed George Floyd’s murder have rippled through our society in ways that will shape our country for decades.

I think about the classic movie Koyaanisqatsi from the early 1980s that explored the dramatic and consequential effects of man and technology on the natural environment. The title of the film ‘Koyaanisqatsi,’ is a Hopi word that translates as “Life out of balance.” If life was out of balance in the early 1980s, it feels like it’s going completely off the rails right now. 

Toni Morrison wrote an essay about working in difficult times when so much of the world felt broken,

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”

This editor’s note might read a little disjointed and all over the place because that’s an accurate reflection of how I feel almost every day these days, but Toni Morrison’s words hit the nail right on the head and perfectly express how I feel about the NYC Photo Community and what you all have meant to me during these past two chaotic years.

You and your work have been an enormous healing inspiration to me and so many others. In the beauty and creativity and vulnerability and pain and struggle you’ve shared in your photographs, you’ve helped to show us all that there is still so much that is so good in the world if you know where to look.

Thanks for being part of this wild ride, and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 107 | March 11 - March 18

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

Issue 104 | February 18 - 25, 2022

"I once was lost, but now I'm found."

Before I shifted my career into web design and photography, I spent many years managing a busy commercial art studio that made custom art installations - things like large-scale hand-painted murals and lobby-filling sculpture installations. Working on these art projects taught me a lot about creative work under the commercial pressures of tight budgets and fast deadlines, and it also just taught me a lot about making artworks that connect with people.

An idea I still think about from those days came from one of our best clients, architect David Rockwell, who designed many highly theatrical restaurants and hospitality spaces around the world.  He would often ask us to return to the idea of the ‘lost and found’ in the art installations, we made for him. If we were hand-painting a decorative pattern on the wall, he wanted parts of it, in almost random ways, to be distressed or fade away entirely. If we were making a sculpture for a large interior space like a hotel lobby, he wanted it to emerge and swoop in and out of the interior depending on where you stood in the space. If we were making a mural for a restaurant, he wanted parts of it to appear as if the mural continued behind the banquets where no one could see it, or have us make the mural out of glass beads that would shimmer and break the surface when disturbed by air currents or different lighting. What was this idea about?  Why did it appeal so much to David Rockwell, and why has it stuck with me after so many years?

Lost and found is a concept that does seem to reflect an eternal and deep aspect of existence. When we walk through a forest, light from a sunny day will appear and disappear in dappled patterns as breezes blow through the forest canopy. Greenery and color appear in the spring, fade away by autumn, largely disappear in the winter and return the following spring. Clouds in the sky form, grow, dissipate, and form again. Emotions, like clouds, form and take over our minds for minutes or hours or milliseconds before submerging into our subconsciousness like bubbles appearing and disappearing on the surface of a boiling pot. Relationships we have with family and friends take dramatically different forms and appearances over the years.

So lost and found can be a way of understanding existence as one of continuous change.  Everything we are and know is transient, evanescent, and subject to observable change given a long enough time frame. 

I think the idea has really stuck with me as a photographer making pictures in the world because I am continually seeking to spot and hold moments that emerge and disappear in fractions of a second. Every day I walk the streets with my camera I see the truth of our lost and found world where mystery and beauty and humor and ugliness reveal themselves in flashes and just as quickly hide again. If my photograph is successful, I hold some proof, some evidence that the world, which can feel so commonplace so much of the time, is as alive and magical a place as I believe it to be. 

From an aesthetic and formal standpoint, the idea of the lost and found also holds power. A photograph that describes a scene where the subject is smack in the center and in perfect focus does half the job a photograph ought to do (a photographic challenge I wrestle with all the time). A photo like that answers some questions about the world. It tells us that such and such looked like this at a certain time on a certain day and that we think this subject is important for whatever reason.  It tells us what the photographer found. It is good to get those answers right. But the other half of the job a photograph ought to do is to raise some questions. Some of the questions you might want to raise are about the world beyond the frame, the world inside the frame, what we are seeing, and on and on.

A photograph that is somehow able to conjure what is lost, as well as what was found, invites viewers to stay longer and to engage longer with what you have made. Those are the photos that I think hold the most power. So much more to say about this idea, but it’s late and I’m feeling pretty lost in the labyrinth for now.

Hopefully, I’ll find ya next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 104 | February 18 - February 25, 2022

Issue 103 | February 11 - 18, 2022

This week’s featured photographer, Rafael Herrin-Ferri, and his project, All The Queens Houses, have me reflecting on photographic typologies and their history and role in the medium.

One of the earliest commercially printed photobooks, The Book of Bread published in 1903, was a cookbook, a photobook, and, in the way it set of examples of bread against simple backgrounds, a photographic typology describing different kinds of bread.

Karl Blossfeldt’s book Art Forms In Nature, published in 1928, isolated details of plant forms against plain cardboard backgrounds in a typology of the kaleidoscopic forms of nature. Blossfeldt saw his typology as an instructional reference for artists and sculptors, and a manifestation of the New Objectivity movement which was a reaction to the abstractions, and gauzy romanticism of Expressionism.

August Sander’s epic project People of the 20th Century, best known from a photo book made from a small selection of the work, Face of Our Time published in 1929, was a photo typology of people and extended the principles of New Objectivity into portraiture.  While the idea of categorizing people into different types is now often seen as a suspect and even a potentially dangerous reductionist view of humanity, Sanders’ images of people, viewed just as photographs, apart from the philosophical/ ideological approach that helped conceive the project, are beautiful, absolutely humanistic on their own, and considered some of the finest portraiture works in photo history.

The concept of photo typologies as an artistic approach was really pioneered by German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher starting in 1959. Their systematic and formal photographs of German industrial architecture, displayed in equally formal grids created an austere, but information-rich presentation of some of the industrial engines of the German economy, and they continued with this work into the 1990s.

These days photo typologies are an established genre of photography used for everything from depicting the plastic waste taking over our planet, as Elizabeth Weber does in her Marine Plastic Typology to Elizabeth Bick’s Movement studies which turn the action and energy of Manhattan streets into choreographed ‘Street Ballets’. You don’t really even need to be a photographer anymore to make a photo typology - just searching a tag on Instagram will automatically generate a typology of images (or at least the start of one).

I think the trait that ties together all the most iconic examples of typologies is that they provide a visual perspective that expands our understanding and appreciation of the world. In the case of Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s Queens houses, we are presented with a new portrait of the city, one that makes tangible the idea and ideal of our city as a place of maximal diversity where people of all backgrounds can live together. In the Becher’s typologies, we realize that there can be a genuine formal beauty to the industrial forms we may have just taken for granted, or dismissed as ugly. Weber’s plastic waste typologies give us a new way to conceive of the damage we are inflicting on our oceans - a portrayal that may motivate some to help prevent these harms.

I think the idea of photo typologies is still a rich framework for photographers to explore and investigate the world, and an especially valuable tool in a city like ours which has such an abundance of material to work with. I know some of you all have made some interesting typologies of the city - send them my way, and let’s make a typology of typologies!

I’ll see you next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 103 | February 11 - February 18