And just like that, things changed. Its not like the $200-ish dollars I made on this digital photo was any different than the $100 zine it was from, that along with 49 other images from this shoot made it part of a whole, it was the fact that in one fail sweep I did three things: 1) I shared a photo to an online community that was based on art, a community that I was invited to by someone who in all of their loving hyperbole called me “one of the greatest living photographers”; 2) I learned a new system of coinage where I was the bank, the teller and the recipient of coin via a system once only known by those that understood financial systems; 3) something that once rested on a hard-drive or in the cloud was now and forever associated to me, and I would be paid for it now and forever more. In one fail sweep, me as a visual creator, a photographer or photographic artist, gain the power of a nation all to myself; I minted a currency - and not only that, I added the face of a sex worker to it. Wow.
Now, I’m not going to say this is or was a particularly radical act when there are now thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people doing it. This is what the new web is going to eventually all be about. you create a profile, that is associated with you, with what you share. It has your digital fingerprint on it and that fingerprint is associated to you via your encrypted identity. This fingerprint is not only your basic information it is also you bank account. This is what you are valued by. In the case of the NFT revolution (that really isnt one, but more on that in a minute), you are valued by what you create and share and what is collectable. You are your own fandom, or the collectors are, and that’s all at once rad… and scary. Now we aren’t asking someone to pay us for what we do for them, we are asking them to pay us for what we do or who we are. This is the most logically illogical furthest extension of the last three generation’s selfishness. In Discord, you build a community around YOU.
So what exactly is a Non-Fungible-Token? Any economics student would tell you that if something is a fungible asset it is something like money. Money, you can logically look at say a dollar and twenty dollars and say that the dollar is twenty of that one dollar and this makes perfect sense. then it gets tricky when you talk about something being non-fungible, taking one thing and saying that one thing can multiply into many of itself well, this is impossible. Being non-fungible means whatever it it is has a unique value so it cannot be related to anything else with value equal, lessor or greater than what it itself is. Whatever it is it is 1 of 1, there is nothing else like it. IT is the very definition of scarcity. You can copy it but there will only ever be the one original. Nothing else, forever.
NFTs are "one-of-a-kind" assets. NFTs are in the digital world and can be bought, traded, sold, given away or whatever any other form of property can be, however, they aren’t tangible items. They are not only unique, but like money, they are also only a token of something greater. An NFT is a certificate of ownership, like a deed, for something that only exists because it was CREATED to exist digitally or a representation of something that is tangible but unique. That is to say, someone somewhere gave it the unique properties to be considered unique. Are you following? Essentially: You go through a process to make this token of something you have created or have named to have value, have value enough to someone else that they will trade it or buy it or collect it and then that thing becomes an asset to someone else. Forever traced back to you, the creator of the thing, and not only that.. but as long as the token, the virtual object is traded — YOU GET PAID, at least part of it.
The process of making a token is called minting. The process of finding essential value to put on your token is called mining. The minting and mining have essentially no relationship with the actual words “minting” and “mining” actual meaning. They are describing a process of making something that just a while ago had very little value now have more value than anything you have ever physically owned.
By minting an NFT you have literally MADE MONEY. Legally? Currently, yes. At least here, for now. This is how I will start.
Just one more thing before I get deeply into it, photography to me is a COPY of reality, or maybe a better explanation would be to say a REFLECTION of reality. Keep that in mind as we go deeper into what my first NFT means.
Now its not outside of my self-awareness what it was that I sold as my first NFT. I sold an image of a model putting her fingers in her mouth, provocatively. That model is Quinn, she is a Ukranian model I shot in Prague in 2018. Quinn also happens to be a sex worker, one that I paid, not for sex but to photograph. Far as I know this is the only form of sex work she does. Is modeling sex work? Not intrinsically, no. Is photography art? Is photographing someone the same intimacy as fucking them? Is sharing their image a form of violence?
In a new book out of Westminster Press in England, written by a very academic author by the name of Waring, there is a chapter entitled: Visual Terrorism: The weaponisation of photography, image-based violence and the online sex worker. The abstract reads:
The rise of the internet in the mid-1990s allowed online sex work to flourish as sex workers began to create self-representations such as photographic self-portraits and portraits to market and sell physical and digital sexual services (Hughes, 2004; Strangelove,1995; Sharpe and Earle, 2003; Sanders, 2005; Cunningham et al 2017: Cunningham et al 2018; Waring, 2020 ). Since then, for full-service women sex workers (women selling sexual acts for money), sex worker-authored portraits have become essential for the transaction of commercial sex. While the internet has allowed female sellers of sex to control, produce and manage the visual façade of sex work—a role facilitated by technology-led disruption that has changed the economics and geographies of sex work—sex buyers and other consumers of sex worker-authored imagery have been allowed to remain anonymous (Maginn, P.J. and Steinmetz, 2014; Sanders et al, 2017). This juxtaposition has fuelled the weaponisation of photography and image-based violence against women sex workers. As with victims of other forms of image-based abuse, this has serious social, professional and health ramifications.
In the US we have this thing that was passed in 2018 by both the House and Senate, both Congressional units, called FOSTA-SESTA. The Senate's Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the House's Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act became law. The law makes it illegal for online services to knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking on their platforms. Sex trafficking is legally defined as such by the 22 U.S. Code § 7102:
The term “sex trafficking” means the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.
and;
The term “commercial sex act” means any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.
Now did I have sex with Quinn? Not in any fungible way, no. Not at all. The transaction was purely photographic and consensual. We’ve created a few things from the time, and even recently I received film scans from a couple of rolls of film I gave her to develop in the brief time we knew each other. The point is, is it by a legal definition “sex trafficking” when the term by definition includes “Obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting” of a “commercial sex act” which is “any sex act on account of which anything of value is given or received by any person.” This is as you can see a VERY broad definition of sex trafficking. One that could include anything, including a date night or even marriage.
Now let’s go into what that means for the internet, for FOSTA-SESTA, and what that means when we present digital art in Crypto that includes anything sexually provocative at all, especially if it includes known SW.
Needless to say, I knew exactly what I was doing. You see, for me photography is a political space. All of it. I don’t work with clients I don’t believe in and I don’t publish in places I don’t know the editorial perspective. I have certainly made some choices that some would consider odd or questionable and in that I will of course explain my perspective if asked (or likely eventually if you read this Substack). Even my output has a point, all of it.
By posting, and minting my genesis NFT, and knowing it would sell I have become a sex worker/trafficker by the definition of a bizarre law. I have also, via FOSTA-SESTA, forced the Foundation.app website and all of crypto to address sex work advocacy and not ignore it.
Although, they will ignore it and me.
And this isn’t my only inference with trafficking as a photographer, however unbeknownst to me. There was this guy Jeffrey Epstein, you may have heard of him, and his relationship with the traditional modeling world via a French subsidiary of the International Modeling agency NEXT Model Management, model scout Jean-Luc Brunel.
Next was an agency that sent me many, many young models in the mid-2010s. They can say they didn’t, I have photographic evidence. They did. The idea was that I was giving them portfolio images for their book to sell them to clients. For Jean-Luc Brunel, the client was conveniently Epstein.
Did I knowingly create portfolio images for Brunel to sell young people to Epstein and his Island buddies? No, that was not the purpose of the images at all. However, you have to ask yourself… when you are asked to shoot young people in the “fashion way” when the fashion way includes things that are imitating as I have mentioned in past Substacks, the Fake Diary provocation of Nobiyoshi Araki or others that do not differentiate between chic and Porno Chic (say Terry Richardson, why did he rise so fast?) — you have to ask yourself, is this really just an unsaid? Why is this agency way more legit than say shooting a Domme and selling the image on an NFT marketplace, or even the Domme herself selling her own images on a site such as OnlyFans? Why isn’t its obvious lie better than the truth? Finally, why is actual coercion overlooked while consentual transaction is considered “trafficking”.
As I’ve been slowly writing this over the last few days, a few things happened. I dropped and sold my second NFT, this time it was a piece called “White Toy Gun”.
The story behind this photo is best stated on the Instagram post when I dropped it.
My second #nftphotography upload to @withfoundation The thing about photography in opposition to the other art forms, if it is even art, is it is based on pure observation. You can only photograph that which is literally in front of you. I was at a major photographic artists party when I took this shot, an indictment of wealth that seemed oblivious to the fact that US has a #guncontrol problem. This was an insensitive prank by the affluent thst need to be taken down a notch. Part of a longer piece I am doing on the places of wealth that have invited me in, unknowingly allowing me to document their idiocracy. If this piece goes well beyond its reserve I will donate 25% of anything after 1 ETH to gun control charities in communities that have been hit hardest by this social disease. #nftart #nftartist
The day it was in a minor bidding scuffle between two NFT collectors, a white man went to three Asian spas in Atlanta and Acworth, Georgia and shot and killed 8 people. The victims in Atlanta were Asian women, as were two of the victims in Acworth, officials said. The two other victims were white, and one man who was injured was stable. The police giving updates are saying the spas are “legit businesses”, and not “sex related.” This is hard to believe because on the dark web review website Rubmaps, there are 74 “erotic massage parlors” listed. The Gold Spa that was attacked was listed, with 108 reviews. In fact it was the first on the list.
The most significant issues with this specific instance of a gun violence are glaring:
The assailant got his gun the same day as the murders.
The assailant only attacked Asian spas, the first one hit literally had the word “Asian” in its name.
The assailant said his motivation was because of “sexual addiction”
The website Rubmaps listed the spas in question as the first listings on the list when looking for “Happy Endings” in the Atlanta Metro.
It was EASY for the 21 year old sexual addict to find somewhere and someone to kill. Robert Aaron Long was able to murder 8 people in less than an two hour stretch of time in two counties, because he was allowed to purchase a gun, the sex workers in question were unprotected by law enforcement and the website, being on the underside of the web, was unmoved.
This morning, not even a full day after the attacks, Atlanta local law enforcement had this to say; “He (Robert Aaron Long) apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction ... it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
It is not ironic how the Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker describes the Atlanta shooting suspect and his motivations. He is outlining exactly how he, himself feels about sex work. A “temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate”, wow. Eight people’s lives were lost and this is about the shooter? He has a “problem” and he wanted to “curb” it, and Law Enforcement is protecting the accused. Make no mistake, these “officials” don’t give a damn about the lives lost. They are speaking about it like a transaction gone wrong!
Let it be known, that it is not beyond me or beyond reason to understand that as we talk about NFT and art spaces that have value because of the scarcity of the digital signature we are also dealing with a transactional relationship with those that utilize photographs to sell services or to sell others into a form of servitude. As photographers we should be ultimately aware of those transactions as we try to enter into a space of creators that make what is in their head translatable into the digital space of NFT. We, as photographers are different, if for no other reason than our art itself is based in a copy of reality.
Our art is a form of Scopophillia for scopophilliacs. We create secretly watching others. We are the ogler. We are the peeper. We are the Scopophiliac. Voyeur. Feeding a global market of people wanting to see what we have seen.
The awareness of how that can effect others and the respect we must have for those being photographed can’t be understated. As well, although there have been theorists throughout the history of the art of photography that have addressed the violence of the photo itself and the “taking” of it or the “capture” we are still only scratching the surface of its relevance as an act of contrition to the greater good or the bad, really bad.
We have to understand the motivations of the buyer, the seller, the subject and in that we are not just making “pretty things” in every case, we are adding to the sense of what is, or isn’t, real. The more value our individual output becomes the more…
We have a Scarcity of Choice.
To be continued… next NO MAKER MADE ME.