NFT Liverpool

Keith Grossman selected two of my photographs for NFT Liverpool in 2022. Keith was then President of TIME and the person who had created and led TIMEPieces, TIME's Web3 project. When he chose work, he chose as someone who had built and sold a collection himself, in front of collectors who would judge it.

Selection is the oldest form of validation in art, and in the NFT market of 2022 it carried extra weight. Anyone could mint. Being chosen by someone with an established eye, for a public event, separated work from inventory.

NFT Liverpool 2022 also had me on its programme as a speaker. I was there as an artist and as someone explaining the market.

Keith first contacted me directly on Twitter, and Keith and I got to know each other. In October 2022 he organised a dinner in New York with Charly Palmer and Dr. Karida Brown, asked my advice on his next TIMEPieces collection, and kept consulting me afterwards on concept, curation, tokenomics, community and launch.

The Liverpool selection sits on the other side of that relationship. As an adviser, I recommended artists to TIMEPieces, and artists I recommended went on to work with TIME. As a photographer, my own work went through Keith's eye. The two roles reinforce each other: I recommended artists from inside the practice of making images, and the person I advised had seen my work and chosen it.

Photography runs through my work alongside strategy. My mobile photography was the subject of an interview by The App Whisperer in 2019, before NFTs gave photographers a way to issue and sell their own work on-chain. Mobile photography is a discipline of constraint: one lens, no studio, the image found rather than staged. That habit of seeing what is already there is the same one I bring to a brief.

2022 was also the year TIME listed me among the 100 most influential people in Web3. The two are separate facts. One recognised a position in a market. The other was a curator's choice of two specific images, which is a narrower and, for a photographer, more exacting form of recognition.