When I first found out about NFTs, almost exactly a year ago, there was almost no photography NFTs being sold. I remember being excited when JN Silva did a drop on Nifty Gateway but it was animated like a lot of the early NFTs. I heard about this guy Justin Aversano doing a project called Twin Flames but other than those two guys, I didn’t see any successful photography projects. In fact, the first NFT I ever made was an animated gif of the logo of this website for our 20th anniversary. I have a weird love for that thing actually, it instantly takes me back to the excitement of first learning about this stuff. 

When I started thinking about what I was going to do for my first photography drop I started coming up with ideas for an animated photo. I spent a long time learning how to do really basic keyframe animation in Photoshop and I spent honestly too much money buying some sound gear and paying an engineer friend of mine to fix the sound I recorded for it, but by the time I was going to release it there was a huge crypto crash in April and it just didn’t seem like a good time. I was going to hold off and wait for my moment. 

That moment came, but not for the animated photos. A few months later Justin’s Twin Flames project had exploded and with it a small NFT photography scene began to rise. Collections of 1/1 photographs started popping up and a lot of them started to do well. Aside from Twin Flames, most of the work was of landscapes and nature. I was excited about this photography movement but not about a lot of the work, it was good, but just not what I was into. I released my collection of juggalo NFTs, which haven’t done great to be honest. I have sold a handful of them, and will keep working on that series slowly over the next year or two, but they were “lazy minted” on OpenSea and I am not going to get into a conversation about specific types of non fungible tokens and contracts, but let’s just say they were less than desirable to some collectors. 

As I was releasing juggalos, there still wasn’t much documentary work that seemed to be doing well, but some street photography did begin to rise. I started seeing work by Monaris, and Billy Dinh, and Dave Krugman and Michelle Viljoen and I was so excited to see this stuff do well. Suddenly photography I liked was blowing up. 

When NFTs first started I made a list of ideas for NFT releases, most of it was zines and books I had already made, along with zines and books I had in my head for the future. When street photography started blowing up I started thinking about my zine Same Old City. SOC isn’t exactly a street photography zine, but it is a collection of images from my first decade living in NYC. It started out as a street photography show called These New York Streets back in 2012. After that it became the zine Same Old City in 2015. It sold out almost immediately and in 2018 I updated it with new photography. That sold out as well. 

So a couple of months ago I started work on this NFT collection. I pulled my favorite shots from the zine into a folder and then just sort of put it on the back burner. There we plenty of excuses for not doing it, but I was going to get to it eventually, I swear.

That’s when Fellowship Trust reached out to me. They had seen some of my work and they “saw potential”. They asked me if I had a collection in the works and I showed them some shots from Same Old City. They immediately  wanted to give me one of their “Futures” grants where they would pay for me to mint my collection on Foundation, which is very expensive. They would also buy 4 of the photos from the collection after it was minted. This meant I had the resources to do the collection the way it was meant to be and I got to work right away. 

Along with the best shots from Same Old City, I went through 15 years of 35mm photography pulling only my favorite shots for this collection. It took me days, but I finally had an edit of about 75 photos. I did my first edit where I pulled 18 photos. I wanted the collection to be somewhere around 20 photos so I had to edit the the other nearly 60 photos down significantly. I think of the original 18, 15 of those made the collection, the rest were incredibly difficult to figure out. I talked to several people about it and did a long phone call with a photographer named Wim VanCappellen who helped curate WHO WE ARE, a group NFT collection (both mine sold on the first day!). Wim was so helpful because he saw my work the same way I did but he was removed from it. He helped me tell the story about New York City I wanted to tell. We made choices that didn’t ultimately have the best 20 photos in it, but the best 20 images to tell that story.

One of the other people I showed the collection to early, was a collector named Jeff Excell. I reached out to him early because I love his collection. The work he loves, I love. I wanted to get his feedback and he told me he was going to let me know if he didn’t like it. Turns out he loved it. He offered me quite a bit of money to sell him one of the photos before it even went on sale which meant so damn much to me and got me so excited to release this to the world. 

So one more question I wanted to answer: Why another street photography collection? Well, it’s because as much as I love the other street photographers I had seen do well, their New York’s just didn’t look like my New York. They were digital, heavily processed images, mostly of Manhattan. They were great, but didn’t tell my story. As I was working on it Omar Robles released a collection called The City which was a lot more raw and when I saw that do well I got really excited. Then even more recently a collection called Enough by Laurent Chevalier came out and was even more raw. Laurent’s work told the story of the black experience in NYC in gritty black and white. It’s fantastic work, but again, it’s not my New York story. I felt Same Old City still had a place. That story still needed to be told. 

So after all that I will just say that Same Old City comes out tomorrow and I haven’t been this excited about a photography project in a long time. Probably since my last book release in 2017. I am just so amped about it. This work is not priced cheap, prices start at .35 ETH which is over $1000, but Foundation is very expensive to mint on, takes a large cut and I am going to pay as many of the people in the images as I can find. I want to keep my work as accessible as possible, but I think this work is priced fairly. There will also be an additional NFT airdropped if this project sells out. It’s a great shot that didn’t quite fit the project, but works well as a stand alone image, but we will keep that a secret for now. 

Now with all that being said, please check out Same Old City on Foundation. This collection was designed to be viewed with four columns, so if you get a chance to look at it on desktop it will look much better. I can’t tell you how long it took me to sequence the collection. Thanks!

 

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