Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. Walter Benjamin
One question keeps coming up these days; where does the value reside in a photograph? It is a question that has been lying about since we entered the digital age but the emergence of web3 and the energy, economics and urgency of photography expressed in the form of an NFT has put the question insistently forward again. I host a podcast, DocumentumTV, for my publishing company, Fall Line Press , and I recently had the pleasure of a lengthy conversation with Alejandro Cartagena and that question haunted our dialogue throughout. Cartagena is to photography + NFTs what Johnny Appleseed was to American orchards. He is an important artist and universally respected for his work in traditional photographic forms and especially his innovative photobook creations. And he has become a widely acknowledged thought leader for what NFTs make possible in photography. More than anyone, he and his editor Fernando Gallegos and the team they are part of at Fellowship Trust, Obscura and their other DAOs are creating new pathways for the medium in this realm and are examining this question especially - where does the value lie?
“Disruptive” is a word that’s thrown about a lot where technology is concerned. I won’t use it. But, it seems to me we can at the least say photography has entered an age of profound transmogrification. For quite a while now photography has been less and less about memorializing, truth showing or even enlightening through the creation of lyrical documents. What it is “more about” going forward is not clear to me and I would like to try and get at it. Of course in the hands of an artist it is about whatever she damn well intends for it to be about. That aside however, I am asking what is photography becoming more about right now - generally speaking. Practitioners involved with the medium have always come in different stripes - “lens-based artists” - “artists working with photography” - “artists working with post-photography’” - “documentary photographers” - “portrait photographers” - “landscape photographers” - “street photographers” - “wedding photographers” - and sometimes just “photographers.” The digitization of the image offered in this electric age, coupled with a phone camera in almost every pocket and a social media platform for every taste has exploded photography into a shower of a trillion points of light. This is true for popular photography and professional and artistic practice as well.
What is different now of course is the degree to which this large number, scope and ease of channels for distribution, have expanded. That vast network coupled with the ubiquity, ease and zero cost of picture taking and picture sharing is shifting what photography is for us. We are living in the age of photography dancing with network effects. And with each turn of the technological screw the culture of photography moves in some ways further from the print — the photograph as analog object — and more toward the quicksilver of images under a glass screen — more toward the photograph as a digital object. And a core attribute of an NFT is to bring that digital object to life on the blockchain as an indelibly authored, signed and circumscribed possibility in the matrix. We are at this present moment in the midst of discovering what that might mean for photography.
And this possibility brings a question. Where exactly is the photograph? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, does the photograph exist there too? I think that is precisely where the photograph exists. Because it exists in the beholder’s eye, it is possible for it to be expressed in an infinite variety of settings, materials, and ways digital or analog. The etymology of behold carries with it the notion of guarding, preserving, remembering - beyond merely seeing - to behold is a “holding gaze” - we hang on to what we’re seeing. As visual artists and photographers we’re in the business of creating objects worthy of beholding. So have we been of the mindset until now that only prints are truly worthy of being beheld - to be gazed upon and hung on to? Have digital objects been beneath our threshold for authoring, signing, collecting, cherishing and interacting with in the realm of art? Has this changed? I think we are finding out.
The possibility of a photograph must first be created by the photographer inside of a negative or digital file - then that data can be shared, expanded, expressed and represented in an infinite variety of possible states of ‘beholding’ opportunities. Once described as the art of fixing a shadow, photography is more than ever just frictionless seeing and showing that is connected to the hand and head of the creator through a digital object. “Hey, look at this.” Inside of that, how does the creator signal her intention and exercise control over her expression?
For much of my life, Alberto Korda’s powerful portrait of Che Guevara was the iconic photograph for the anti-establishment. It became known as the “Guerrillero Heroico” and was more than that to be sure, but it was counter-culture gold. I have seen it displayed on billboards, tee-shirts, coffee cups and anywhere there is a surface that will hold ink, paint or needlepoint. The Victoria and Albert Museum speculates that it has been reproduced more than any other other image in the history of photography. Now of course it wanders the halls of the internet in jpgs by the millions. There are also many vintage and modern signed silver gelatin prints created by Korda during his life time that are treasured and well stewarded on walls and in print files around the globe. Presumably, most of those, especially those bearing his signature reflect his intention. I hadn’t realized until research for writing this essay that the iconic version that is so well known was a crop from an the original wider angle. And to my mind, as uncropped, it is a more interesting, elegant and nuanced version of the photograph we now know. Korda however wanted a more powerful image and he got it with his crop. That was his primary intention. And once released into the world it became expressed in thousands of ways that did not reflect his intentions and did not reward him for his creation.
The photograph itself exists in none of those places — or you might say it exists in all of those places. But, it exists first and most truly in Korda’s eye and ours when we behold it wherever and in whatever form it appears. There is much that could be said about Korda’s courage, intelligence and artistry in placing himself in that context, in that moment with his Leica and film; his framing, cropping, editing and all the other choices that lead to the photograph as we know it. But, lets just say here that he created the photograph Guerrillero Heroico and examine where is that photograph and where is its value.
As with every cultural artifact the entire context of its appearance in the world will affect the meaning and impact of it. And that will be so whether it is beheld on the glass screen or a vintage print held in the hand or on a postcard. I first saw that image in the early 70s, probably in a magazine and certainly on a poster, at a time when Cuba, the Cold War, Viet Nam and what was called then the “youth movement” was a frothy cultural stew looking for revolutionary icons. I saw that photograph through the lens of that context. Looking at it now, 50 years later, the contexts have shifted and seeing it now on my iPad it is for me a calcified historical reference point drained of the emotion it carried or that I brought to bear in my experience of it for that first time then. Yet, like a vagabond with a bottomless knapsack, the photograph gathers the flotsam and jetsam of each age, with each positioning and encounter it has as it moves through time and varying contexts. The photograph’s original data, intent and context becomes like the prow of a ship encrusted over time with the barnacles of its voyage.
I came to photography relatively late in my evolution as an artist. I studied drawing and painting and I was and I am still especially attracted to analog object-ness in art. And not surprisingly my pathway into photography as art was very much driven by prints. In 1991 I had a ‘road to Damascus’ level photo-conversion experience. A very smart, kind and patient curator, Jane Jackson, had just opened the superb Jackson Fine Art photography gallery in Atlanta. She spent an hour with me examining together William Eggleston’s Graceland Portfolio. I was profoundly moved by those photographs in a way no photograph had ever effected me. She of course politely and generously encouraged me to acquire it. It was several thousand dollars and a second mortgage would have been necessary for me to do so at that time so I declined. But, I came away a believer and that same week I bought a used Leica M6 rangefinder instead and I became a photographer. Out of curiosity today I looked up how that portfolio would have fared for me as an investment. The last sell price I found for the portfolio was from 2013 and it sold then for around $200,000. I’m sure it has an economic value of many times that today. The easy lesson there was that I should have followed my passion and instincts and moved heaven and earth to acquire the object that had smitten me so. And the deeper lesson is that a work of art can literally change a life. The non-economic value of Eggleston’s Graceland was for me life altering. For me the value in that photograph is spread across time, it exists in the prints, and in the other expressions I’ve seen of those images over time; at exhibitions, in photobooks and the like. This includes now my sharing with you here this story and a screen grab of one of the photographs. In another writing it would be interesting to consider what those accumulations would look like if those photographs were released as NFTs as has happened with the contact prints from the August Sander Archive.
The knock on effects of the Graceland Portfolio for me include all the information I’ve garnered from and about it, including its sell price and all that has surrounded my experience with it. These values inhere in the photograph for me like a felt penumbra. On a broader societal plane similar gatherings attach to a work of art. When Marcel Duchamp marked up his copy of the Mona Lisa with mustache and transgressive graffiti he created L.H.O.O.Q. and something new and he shifted the positioning of the original - another barnacle. Over time his prank and wisecrack has also shifted as the context of gender mores have continued to evolve.
Many years after my Eggleston encounter, in 2005, I was working as an attorney with a large, ‘silk-stocking’ law firm in Atlanta called at the time, Powell, Goldstein. The firm had a fabulous art collection which was anchored on the 11th floor by three of Thomas Struth’s most important photographs from his museum work. The most famous, The Pantheon, a massive eight foot wide tour de force, was a daily experience for me for several years. I was on the firm’s art committee and one day our CFO emailed me that he had seen a Struth listed on eBay and maybe we should look at our budget and see if we wanted to pursue it. I confirmed it was a ‘real thing’ and reached out to Struth’s New York gallery to speak with them about it. They were upset that a Thomas Struth photograph was listed on eBay. And I am not sure either whether they were thrilled that an Atlanta lawyer trolling eBay for photographs to collect was in their mailbox. When they did their research to confirm that we held three of the more important pieces including The Pantheon they invited me to come and visit. They were very gracious and I was shown a lot of work. Ultimately we didn’t move forward with an acquisition, but in addition to having some fun I learned that successful galleries with a stake in important and valuable work are keen to have as much control as possible over how those objects are released into and circulate in the world. The very idea that their artist’s work was offered on eBay was anathema to them. Maybe for them there were ‘if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas’ kinds of concerns around the context they were seeing. They can’t have work from an ace in their stable of artists having an eBay listing. And how should an artist think about whether or how to steer her work in the world?
I proffer this example in part to show how far elements of the traditional art world will have to come to catch up with the new values being created by photography expressed as NFTs. Cartagena as well as Alec Soth and most recently Stephen Shore have all offered some of their work in the NFT space. Shore’s photo sell proceeds from the Ukraine NFT went to benefit causes there. Artist Klea McKenna who I also spoke with at length on DocumentumTV recounted her story of how and why she brought to NFTs some of her beautiful work that had been earlier exhibited at SFMOMA.
It seems to me that it is just a matter of time before it is common place for most photographers to share aspects of their work in this new space. Magnum and many of its photographers are collaborating with Cartagena and his DAOs to share work through projects funded or in other ways connected to NFT offerings.
The traditional art pathways of galleries, museums, photobook publishers like myself will all be finding ways to relate to and network within this new possibility for photography. Unlike Instagram and other web2 photo sharing, NFTs are digital objects that carry the imprimatur of the artist, a provenance and the potential for patronage, ownership and the economic valence that attaches to that expression as securely as a signature on the print.
Perhaps the provenance is attached more securely. There have been numerous well documented cases of forgeries and fraud involving prints over the years, the most publicized case perhaps involving Lewis Hine prints. And as we are now witnessing these NFTs will be collectible and cherished. Shore’s NFT earlier this month was acquired for 13.20 ETH which I’m told was equivalent to about $30,000 at the time of sale.
The photograph express as an NFT is a new form of steerage inside of the digital realm that places more control and economic benefit back into the hands of creators. Many participants in this community are excited about the possibility of realignment between the creators, collectors and the institutions and other intermediaries who support and quite reasonably profit from the creators. And there will likely be some disintermediation - and I suspect there will be quite a lot of re- intermediation.
At this early stage in the evolution of NFTs no one can anticipate of course all of the outcomes and results. Ultimately, though, what may fall out of these new possibilities will be the creation of a new way of valuing the photograph beyond the print. A new process is emerging for valorization of the photograph tied to its existence as a marketable, collectible digital object - the NFT. And this is likely to cause a recalibration and reevaluation of the role of the photographic print. It may have the effect of enhancing the overall economic value of physical prints - or not. New markets take time to shake out but the dust will eventually settle. Certainly inclusion of a photograph in a photobook does nothing to impact the value of a print - unless perhaps to enhance it.
As Marshall McLuan taught us long ago - any new electronic or technological extension of man does not erase or supplant the previous extension - it just brings it into a new focus; new context; and a new way of being. TV does not erase radio. The photographic print is not dead, long live the photographic print ....and the photobook, ... and the NFT. There is value everywhere up and down the line. Behold!