Issue 110 | April 8 - April 22, 2022
A deep critical dive into NFTs and photography exploring how they work, possible benefits, and the many pitfalls of this new technology.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.