Hello friends, welcome to another issue of Desire Path — a newsletter for photographers and photography aficionados interested in NFTs and web3.
Two Crossed Paths
“Maryna’s Mimesis” by Maryna Brodovska is a collage series of self-portraits created in response to Russia's war against Ukraine to preserve the artist's identity.
In “The Intentional Object”, Danielle Ezzo reveals the gestures made in digital retouching in order to unpack the nature of this methodology, but also break away from its intended application. Danielle highlights in colourful strokes the features that are typically removed – bruises, pimples, scars.
Three Photo Projects
“Ellipsis” by Amy Woodward is a month-long diary that spans multiple subjects: the desolation and loss caused by a historic flood, journal-like notes of chance encounters, the natural world of plants and animals, as well as an extension of Woodward’s long-form practice with mother subjects and their changing families. Available to mint as part of The Obscura “The World Today” photo collection.
ICE64 by Sam King documents the desolate landscape of Iceland during the winter. It's also one of the first photography projects taking advantage of on-chain rendering. This is where the 64 in ICE64 comes from — 64px images, with 64 colours.
Chicken.photos is a project created by Jacob Bijani and Noah Kalina where chickens (and other animals roaming on Noah’s property) take selfies. From the project’s about section: “How does this work? The system consists of a Canon 7D, a speed flash, a Raspberry Pi, and an ultrasonic motion trigger. Whenever a chicken passes in front of the motion sensor, the Pi snaps a photo on the camera, which in turn fires the speed flash. Once the photo is taken, the Pi downloads the photo from the camera’s SD card and uploads it to our website. The photo is then tweeted and potentially minted as an NFT.”
Four Art Projects
“Opals” by Solyaev is a series of 44 metaopals, endlessly shimmering and changing their texture and color. The collection is inspired by the phenomenon of opalescence.
“The Quiet Still” by Audra is a collection of digital landscape pieces created out of a desire to connect with nature as a way of battling agoraphobia.
“Nostalgic Diary” is a collection of fashion paintings by Mahboubeh Absalan.
“Let Me Fall” by Sarah Richardson explores the pressures of perfection and the ephemeral – featured in the FLOWER GANG exhibition on 1stDibs.
Five Things to Check Out
Dame's personal website contains their thoughts, guides, an overview of their Ethereum activity, along with works of art offered as NFTs. It's a great source of inspiration and information.
Meet FoundationOS — the operating system for web3. All of the components, API endpoints, and smart contracts that power foundation.app are now available for developers to build on top of Foundation Protocol.
Upload your own space on Oncyber. And a thread on how to organize and curate a gallery.
Utility is a new podcast hosted by Jeff Excell and Bernardo Caria from Big Hugs Studios about photography NFTs, and the surrounding community.
Adam Neumann-backed blockchain startup Flowcarbon raises $70 million.
See you in two weeks,
Alina, Chase, Lynnette, Noah, Pete and Vivian.
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love amy's stuff and the chickens of course!