Last but not least: these PhotoVogue collections are photography excellence
For the past two months, we’ve been highlighting the incredible participants in our partner residency program with PhotoVogue. It’s with great sentimentality that we bring this round of drops to a close–but not without introducing you to the final eight artists and their collections. And if you feel like checking out the previous drops, you can find them all here:
Digital art matters. Here’s some you should explore
Get inspired by this week’s collections tackling equity & justice
Love, creativity, battles, and identity: these PhotoVogue collections are here to say something
Explore the latest photographs from the Voice x PhotoVogue NFT Residency collection
Go around the world with art: PhotoVogue Collection week II
Explore PhotoVogue’s first week of NFT drops
Bettina Pittaluga is a French-Uruguayan photographer who captures intimate and sensitive moments of life through her lens. A photographer since the age of 14, Bettina incorporates her background in photojournalism and Sociology into her work as she documents her subjects. “The center of my work is the human, I put forward people who have things to tell and who are in connection with my convictions, whatever they are. I am very attracted to love, tenderness, and kindness. And all of that goes hand in hand with the fact that I fight every day against injustice, violence, and hate.”
Alessandro Cinque has encountered many stories throughout his life that have moved him and have ignited a social and civil indignation deep within. He enjoys working with minorities and in rural places — it is his belief that photography has the power to stop a moment, move consciousnesses, and shine a spotlight. His recent interests have led him to explore how climate change is impacting traditional cultures in South America. The driving force behind Alessandro’s work is a desire to give back, in part, what South America and its people have given to him.
Reatile Moalusi was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. As an African and a person of color, he has often seen his people portrayed in ways inauthentic to his identity and culture — ways that misrepresent his community’s values and systems. Reatile’s work deepens his understanding of what it means to be an African. He uses photography as a process to reevaluate, rediscover, and ultimately redefine what it means to be an African. Through photography, Reatile hopes to expel stigmas associated with his skin, his culture, his environment, and his people. His photographic approach seeks to inspire a consciousness by highlighting similarities over indifference.
Federica Sasso is a visual artist based in Milan, Italy. Her works play at the intersection between photography and new media. Her subjects mostly revolve around human behavior, physical illness, and mental illness — both in the world at large and within her own family. Her NFT series, Aphasia, is part of an ongoing research project documenting physical and mental illness through family archives. Her collection is a deeply personal project, inspired by her grandmother’s loss of language after being diagnosed with Aphasia in 2005.
David Favrod was born in Japan but currently lives and works in both Switzerland and Spain. David works across mediums utilizing photographs, drawings, videos, and installations that combine elements of multiple cultures and genres. Favrod’s images tend toward the fanciful and turn disturbing at times. His NFT collection, The End, is part of a long-term project that reflects his state of mind — what worries him, what nourishes him. Through it, he reveals a part of himself to the viewer, offering up a snapshot of his memories, thoughts, and dreams.
Ruslan Smirnov was born in Simferopol, Ukraine and currently lives in Crimea. What began as a childhood interest in photography, quickly grew into a full-fledged passion. Ruslan specializes in film photography and his style is characterized by mostly close-up shots of faces that reveal the emotions of people in everyday situations. Ruslan and his wife spend most of their time traveling the world and taking pictures of interesting people whose stories and images aren’t easily accessible to the average person.
Lawrence Agyei is a Ghanaian photographer with footprints in Italy, living on Chicago’s south side. His work focuses on race, gender, geography, and identity. Through Agyei’s use of portraiture, the hidden languages held deep within the body of his subjects find comfort revealing themselves through Agyei’s lens. The vibrancy, boldness, the coolness, and subtle textures of his portraits unveiled through Agyei’s use of film ensures that their voices will never go unnoticed nor will they be forgotten. As long as Agyei has his camera, there will always be a platform for his subjects to speak their truths in the most melodic way.
Luke Bell Doman is a photographer, stylist and creative director born and bred in Cape Town, South Africa. As an artist born into a new era in South African Politics, Luke feels it is his obligation to impact the spaces he occupies in a way that makes things easier for the next generation of people from previously oppressed groups to thrive.
His NFT collection, FIGHT, marks the beginning of Luke’s exploration into imagination, alter ego, and the tension between self-perception and lived reality. FIGHT aims to invoke nostalgia through the notion that play is the first step in self-determination, presenting the character types that young people use as canvasses upon which to project early notions of strength and resilience.
