Explore PhotoVogue’s first week of NFT drops
10 members of the renowned global photography community released collections this week–and they’re selling quickly.
This summer, Condé Nast’s PhotoVogue announced they would explore Web3 in partnership with us at Voice. In the past few months, we’ve collaborated on a digital artist residency for 81 photographers. The experience was life changing, for both the participants and our team–and we are thrilled to share the initial results.
Meet the 10 artists who kicked off collection drops this week and stay tuned for more dropping every single weekday through November. As a reminder, the best way to support emerging artists is to collect their work. Explore the full program here.
Irina Werning
Irina Werning is a photographer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her NFT collection, la promesa, addresses the long-term effects of the pandemic on children. It calls into question how children can engage in demanding equal access to education. La promesa follows the story of Antonella, a 12 year old girl living in Buenos Aires, who vowed to cut her hair once she could resume in-person classes at school, which had been suspended as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Antonella said she was offering up her most precious treasure in exchange for her school life back. Her hair was her identity. She felt she lost her identity without school, and said: “When I finally go back to school they will know I’m a different person, I feel like a different person.”
Irina Werning met Antonella while working on a long-term project, Las Pelilargas, which focused on researching and photographing women with long hair. What began as an exploration of gendered expectations and associations tied to women’s hair, became one about the education crisis and the inequality gap exposed by the pandemic.
Ana Margarita Flores
You can buy Fisherman on Ancon port now — 1/3 remaining
Born in Peru and raised in Switzerland, Ana Margarita Flores is a London-based photographer whose work is deeply inspired by a desire to fight inequalities and bring visibility to the stories around her. Her practice is heavily concerned with themes of diversity, representation, and feminism.
Her NFT collection, La Perla del Pácifico (The Pacific Pearl), documents the consequences of the 2022 oil spill in Lima, Peru that was caused by the Spanish energy company Repsol. The collection highlights the negative effects the oil spill has had on the local community of Ancon and their economy, which heavily relies on tourism and fishing. Ana Margarita initiated this project in collaboration with her grandmother, who lives in Ancon, to bring sustained visibility to a town and community that continues to suffer from the effects of this ecological disaster. Ancon, once known as La Perla del Pácifico — the pearl of the pacific — is now only a shell of its former self.
“This event did not only destroy the region’s ecosystems but also weakened the lives of those working daily on the coastline who are directly or indirectly reliant upon fishing and tourism. When I shot the images, the authorities closed beaches and banned fishing within a 300 km radius.”
Sophie Keitzmann
Collect The Individual Collection II now
Sophie Kietzmann is a Berlin-born, Brussels-raised, NYC-based, gender fluid, queer photographer. Their path in photography has taken them through play, trauma, uprooting, coming out, identification, and spirituality. Photography has taught them precious lessons about visual representation of marginalized groups, gender expression, and the fragility of social constructs.
Sophie’s NFT collection, The Individual Collection, is about how protecting the integrity of individual identities is the catalyst for achieving equity and justice. Holding space for individuals of marginalized communities and underrepresented identities is an integral part of Sophie’s commitment to perpetuating equity and justice in the world. Each individual in the collection comes from a community or personal position within which they have experienced discrimination and/or prejudice. As an exploration of this topic, Sophie reached out to each of their sitters to ask them what equity and justice means to them.
Juan Brenner
Collect 1_MEMORYCLUSTER for your collection
Juan Brenner is a self-taught photographer who lives and works in Guatemala City. After working in New York as a fashion photographer for over a decade, Brenner returned to his native Guatemala where he began making work about the people and complex territory in the country’s Western Highlands. Juan uses photography to reflect on the fluidity and abstract nature of identity and territory, his images capture the complexities of cultural hybridization and, more poignantly, the way power, hierarchical structures, and inequality are instrumentally continued through time.
Juan’s NFT collection, This Universe, is a collection of 12 images of objects that hold intense energy and significant personal history. He arranged and manipulated the objects in his photographs in order to create metaphors for his memories. His collection is inspired by his own family history and the complex relationship he has with his father. Creating this collection was a practice in healing for Juan — healing years of mental instability, substance abuse, and depression. He approaches the idea of a memory “Archive” in a very physical way with this collection. Being able to touch and manipulate forgotten and surprising objects from his past was a practice in reconstructing and revisiting important moments.
Cecilia Sordi Campos
Add à luz #4 to your collection
Cecilia Sordi Campos grew up in the countryside in Brazil. For the past 15 years, she has lived and worked in Australia. Her artistic practice is positioned in the field of socially-engaged art and expanded photography. Her projects place value on ‘narratives of the self’ as resources for creating effective visual vocabularies to represent the complex psychological experiences of being-ness, womanhood and the female body, and migration and identity.
Cecilia’s NFT collection, the motherhood that wasn’t, is inspired by her experiences with infertility. Though the artist never wanted to be a mother, the concept of infertility is now a part of her daily reality. She explores the question of why, if she never wanted to have children in the first place, did she experience deep emotional conflict upon learning of her own infertility. Was this due to societal expectations? A biological need? In part, her project was a catharsis through which she was able process her complex emotions surrounding infertility. The project also seeks to amplify a topic many consider taboo so that she may help other women feel less isolated.
Gili Benita
Gili Benita is a photographer, born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, and currently based in New York City. His works focus on intimate-based visual storytelling and portraiture.
His NFT collection, The Highschool, is a collaborative, ongoing photo series that explores intimacy and sexual expression among a friend group of yound gay men in Brooklyn, NY. Gili captures still image portraiture within the sitter’s personal safe space. His photographs explore concepts of intimacy and self-expression. In order to give back to the community he has the privilege and blessing of documenting, Gili will donate 50% of the proceeds from his NFT collection to the Ali Forney Center — a community center that helps LGBTQ houseless youth in the United States.
“Entering a community I’m not a part of, is always a privilege, especially as a photographer. Knowing how to work around that privilege while always being aware of it, is the core of my work. Spending time and sharing intimacy with the collaborators I photographed exposed me to re-evaluating my own definition of intimacy.”
Eleana Konstantellos André
Eleana Konstantellos André is a freelance French, Greek, and Mexican photographer. Through interviews, photographic staging, and personal and public archival, she seeks to create a relationship between past and present where she can explore themes such as the mechanisms of memory and the search for identity. She sees photography as an object of memory, oblivion, and manipulation. Through archival material and images, she analyzes past narratives and tries to discover the historical, political, and cultural process that underlies them.
Eleana’s NFT collection, A Walk on the Wild Side of Biometric Justice, addresses the question: is it necessary to monitor people in order to impart justice? Through this series, she contemplates the reality of our current system — a pervasive state of mass surveillance through our phones, computers, surveillance cameras — and how it has been sold to us by government bodies that these systems are in place for our own protection. The series uses dark humor to comment on the darker and more authoritarian side of justice.
Lebo Thoka
Bastet is now available for collecting
Lebo Thoka is a South African photographer whose work is influenced by her feminist politics. The topics she covers range from the issue of femicide in South Africa, the nuanced experiences of navigating South Africa and the larger world as a black woman, as well as exploring black womanhood in proximity to topics such as religion, spirituality, history vs present day, culture, agency, etc. Her work often repurposes objects to translate new meaning and address social issues linked to navigating black womanhood and the violence it faces within society.
Lebo’s NFT collection, The Sages, is all about acknowledging the importance of community and recognizing the most unseen members of society as a whole. The series focuses specifically on acknowledging black women by placing them in scenes of divinity & peace. Her goal is to acknowledge & free black womanhood through the space of celebration rather than through pain or harmful stereotypes.
María Fernanda Garcia
Selfportrait of María Fernanda is available for purchase
María Fernanda Garcia is an Ecuadorian photographer who seeks to represent the subjectivity of human beings that are affected or touched by movement or transformation, the space they inhabit, as well as their own gestures. This interest has led the artist to approach themes of migration, motherhood, rites of passage, and now — mental health.
For her NFT collection, That Epic Moment, María Fernanda decided to share with the world a deeply personal insight into her own mental health journey — one that began with an emotional and psychological breakdown five years ago. Through this collection, she pays tribute to the exact moment when she was able to see beyond her reality. María Fernanda was not alone in her experience, her mother and sister had similar journeys. The photographs in this collection create a visual poem about mental health in the lives of three women from the same family. The women involved in the series welcomed and embraced these difficult episodes as an act of resistance against a society that seeks to standardize and unify the human experience. To protect and honor their individual stories, María Fernanda has borrowed words and phrases directly from their testimonies.
Magda Kuca
Buy Slavic Bestiary: Dziad Śmiguśny-collodion animation, only on Voice
Magda Kuca is a Polish photographer who explores the cyclical nature of human rituals by utilizing historical photographic techniques such as wet plate collodion, using contexts of identity, memory, and folklore. Kuca’s practice is influenced by the supernatural and folklore, working with portraiture and storytelling.
Magda’s NFT collection, Slavic Bestiary & Family Tales, explores ideas of impermanence — impermanence of memory, of physical objects, of history — and the ways in which we expand and perhaps even destroy impermanence by injecting ephemeral things into the more permanent digital world. For her NFTs, Magda utilized photographs that have been generated by traditional, hands-on processes such as wet collodion and chlorophyll printing and then bridged them to the digital world by adding animation and sound.
