By Scott Strazzante
In March 2021, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, sold a non-fungible token (NFT) for over $69 million at a Christie’s online auction. The sale put NFTs on the radar of many people who had never heard of them before. I was among that group.
Before I go on, for those of you who are unfamiliar with non-fungible tokens, I will try to explain them. Non-fungible means unique or one of a kind. You are non-fungible. A non-fungible “token” is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain. A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger that records the provenance of a digital asset. An NFT can be a photograph, a video, a music album, a collage, a tweet, a basketball highlight, a newspaper article or anything you can find online. When one buys an NFT all they get is the token. The copyright remains with the creator. It is akin to selling a print with an edition of 1/1.
So, back to early 2021. After hearing about Beeple’s NFT sale, I visited OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. My first impression was that most of the digital art for sale was motion graphics in 2D and 3D forms. I didn’t see much photography, so I didn’t think it was for me.
As the year moved forward, NFTs and their relationship to the world of photography started to become more prevalent on my Twitter feed.
By August, I decided to jump in. At that point, I was still naïve about NFTs and the process of minting one. Minting is how a digital file is turned into a digital asset on the blockchain. I knew that it cost money and that cost was based on the price of “gas.” Gas fees are one-time payments that users make to compensate for the computation energy required to process transactions on the blockchain.
I quickly found out that the only place that I could sell NFTs was on OpenSea. OpenSea allows anyone to put up collections of images or whatever digital files one is trying to sell for a small initialization fee (less than $100). The minting costs are paid by the purchaser of the NFT. On other marketplaces like Foundation, where one is invited to join by a current member, the digital file must be minted before it is put up for sale, which can cost between $50 and hundreds of dollars depending on the fluctuating price of gas.
Before selling on OpenSea, I had to first purchase the cryptocurrency Ethereum and place it in a crypto wallet. MetaMask was my wallet of choice. Once that step was finished, I connected my wallet to OpenSea and was ready to create a collection. Most collections consist of 20-50 images that are linked thematically. Since I could only sell work that I own the copyright to, my choices for my Genesis (NFT lingo for first) collection were my Common Ground project, my Shooting from the Hip iPhone images and my Pacific Series of abstract ocean photos. This is where I made a huge mistake. Being naïve, I dropped all three collections at once. In hindsight, I should have put up only one collection, or, even better, I should have waited until I had spent time on Twitter getting to know the artists and collectors in the NFT space. Twitter and Discord are the hubs of the NFT world and Twitter Spaces is where people come to chat and discover new work. Real world success does not translate to NFT success, and lots of NFTs are purchased not based on the quality of the image but on the back story of the creator.
Despite my naïveté and posting too much work, I still had a very successful start. Over the first month, I sold almost 50 images at .2 ETH (Ethereum) each, which at the time was the equivalent of $40,000.
My Shooting from the Hip collection was by far my most popular. I was riding high, having sold two-thirds of that collection of 50 photographs. The goal is to entirely sell out a collection, allowing the buyers to resell the NFTs on the secondary market. This is where NFTs are unique in the art world. The creator of the NFT gets a percentage of a resale, the industry standard is 10%, every time one changes hands.
However, for some reason, the sales of Shooting from the Hip dried up as quickly as they had started. After a while some of the collectors who were hoping to make a quick buck by reselling my work got impatient and lowered their resale price below the price that I was selling my remaining ones. The work was pretty much dead to the collectors with only a profit motive.
This is where the NFT space is a bit of a pyramid scheme. For every collector who is interested in buying the art for art’s sake, there are 99 who are only there to resell it.
Just recently, I received an invitation to join Foundation, so I am trying my luck there. On Foundation, all NFTs are sold in auction format. The creator posts a reserve price and once someone bids, a 24-hour auction begins. I feel that OpenSea is the Walmart of NFTs while Foundation is Neiman Marcus.
Another thing that has happened, that I never thought I would do, is I started collecting NFTs. I have since rolled about half of my $40k of sales back into supporting my fellow artists by purchasing their photography. I have even purchased a couple of PFPs (photos for profile) which are collections of 10,000 pieces of artwork that are slightly different with varying degrees of rarity. The most valuable of these are CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. The cheapest one of those can be purchased today for 52 ETH or a little over $200,000. Since that is way out of my league, I purchased a Desperate ApeWives’ NFT for .6 ETH. Since I bought it, it has almost tripled in value.
On a side note, a troubling aspect of NFTs is the effect on the environment. Crypto art is responsible for tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions generated by the cryptocurrencies used to buy and sell them. There are more environmentally friendly blockchains like FLOW, Solana and Cardano, plus Ethereum 2.0, a vast improvement over the current Ethereum blockchain, is supposedly right around the corner.
With that in mind, I have decided to join Cheeze, a photography-focused media and entertainment company built on the FLOW blockchain, that is set to debut in early 2022. Cheeze is going to be set up like an app-based magazine where articles will include images that are able to be purchased as NFTs. Cheeze will also operate the Muzeum of Photography in Decentraland, the virtual destination for digital assets. Once Cheeze is up and running, I am going to lessen my use of OpenSea and Foundation.
In general, the NFT photography space is dominated by landscape photographers. Street photographers are prevalent, followed by fine art and documentary photographers. There are currently not many photojournalists in the NFT space, probably because many don’t own the copyright to much of their work.
Among others, my friends Barbara Davidson, Michael Christopher Brown, Ben Lowy and Jed Jacobson are some of the photojournalism NFT pioneers dipping their toes into the pool. I, also, have had conversations with MediaStorm founder Brian Storm on how to navigate this exciting new field.
The most successful NFT photographer, so far, is Justin Aversano. Aversano is an artist and curator working within the New York City and Los Angeles art scene. His Twin Flames collection, which he started photographing in 2017, consists of 100 portraits of twins in honor of his deceased fraternal twin. The volume of sales, so far, on the primary and secondary market combined is almost $18 million. The least expensive Twin Flame currently sells on OpenSea for 155 ETH or $620,000.
Another top seller is Alejandro Cartagena with his award-winning Carpoolers’ project. Cartagena is a Mexican photographer who documented pickup trucks driving along the highway that connects Nuevo Laredo, Mexico to Laredo, Texas. From a highway overpass, Cartagena photographed men and children sleeping or crammed together in the back of open-aired flatbed trucks.
Isaac “Drift” Wright is possibly the most famous NFT photographer. Wright, a former U.S. Army paratrooper and current urban explorer, was arrested in January 2021 for breaking into and trespassing in multiple buildings in Cincinnati. He was caught after posting the dramatic images of his shoes high above the urban landscapes on his Instagram account, DrifterShoots. His NFT collection “Where My Vans Go” is a darling of collectors.
Discouragingly, the NFT space is male-dominated. Over the past 21 months, women account for just 16% of the NFT art market, according to a report published by the research firm ArtTactic. Additionally, 55% of all NFT sales are by 5% of artists (16 artists in total). Overall, the top 25% of artists account for almost 90% of total values.
When I entered the NFT space four months ago, most artists were on their own, but recently the most successful creators have been forming decentralized autonomous organizations, better known as DAOs.
I am a member of RAW, a photography-focused DAO, which according to their Discord, “aims to curate the best collection of photography and build the best community in the space.” RAW was founded by the previously mentioned Alejandro Cartagena, documentary photographer Omar Z Robles and a handful of other NFT luminaries.
Another exciting development is the emergence of Quantum Art. Quantum, founded by Justin Aversano, is the first on-chain platform focused solely on photographers and their work.
Quantum curates and drops NFT collections on a weekly basis. As of now, all eight of their drops have sold out. These collections have included Homegrown by Julie Blackmon, Ethiopia by Joey L, Touching Strangers by Richard Renaldi and Anxious Pleasures by Amy Elkins. I believe this sales model is going to dominate the NFT space in the upcoming years.
Quantum donates 2.5% of the profits from every drop to carbon-reduction initiatives.
Additionally, every curated artist on Quantum agrees to donate an additional 2.5% of their profits to a charity of their choice.
I do know that everything I have written is akin to doing a deep dive into the wonders of CompuServe and AOL dial-up back in the mid-90’s. The NFT space is moving quickly and most of the above will be terribly outdated by this time next year.
My best days of monetizing my photography through NFTs might be behind me or I might make a million dollars next year, but either way it has been a worthwhile endeavor. I have been exposed to and inspired by the work of scores of photographers and I have listened in on and had many interesting conversations about the industry and where it is headed.
The NFT space has many flaws, but it is still in its infancy. The NFT photography community is especially upbeat and motivated to be inclusive and diverse.
So, hop aboard, buckle in and let’s go for a ride.
Scott Strazzante is a photojournalist with the San Francisco Chronicle, the author of two books, Common Ground and Shooting from the Hip. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @ScottStrazzante.
