NFTs at Magnum

I don’t know if it is just me, but I find NFTs really interesting. Towards the end of June, I found in my inbox a message from Magnum Photos announcing that as part of their 75th anniversary celebration, the famous agency would be releasing 75 NFTs for auction. The exclusive chance to own “an original piece of art”, as they put it. A photograph by a famous photographer in the digital realm.

I cannot say that I know a lot about NFTs, but I do know a little. Think of blockchain as digital breadcrumbs leading you back to the original maker, or in this case photographer. A chain of custody, if you like. This in theory guarantees that a particular data-set (the photograph) is authentic and owned by a particular individual.

The best analogy I have heard to describe an NFT is to: “….think of an NFT as a book…. there are thousands of copies, thousands of identical books, but you have the only signed copy”. You have a ‘special’ and ‘unique’ copy of the book, but you have no rights to it, no ability to copy, edit, republish or sell one chapter at a time. You simply own a unique copy, which if you grow tired of it, you can try to resell exactly as it came to you.

But what does this really mean in the Magnum context. Each photographer who sells an NFT sells a digital file with proof of ownership to a successful bidder, who in a sense becomes part of the chain of custody of the photograph, part of the blockchain. There is no physical photograph, only the digital image. There is no right to use the photograph, no rights to license it to a magazine for use in an article for instance, that copyright remains with the photographer and Magnum. The owner cannot even print it.

In reality, the person who successfully acquires a Magnum Photos NFT has the right to look at it on a computer screen and claim ownership. Perhaps there is an option to hang the photograph over the virtual fireplace in the virtual parallel universe populated by the owner’s avatar in Second Life, or There.com? Or, is this just a $1000 screen saver with bragging rights?

Quoting from the Magnum website: “Turning photographs into NFTs generates authenticity and value on the internet, allowing photographers to produce and sell their work online as they would in the real world. For buyers, NFTs present a unique opportunity to actually own an original piece of art or photograph on the internet, as opposed to buying, or downloading a copy.” I note that the Magnum archive is searchable online, as is Getty Images, and countless other photography websites, both public and private. In addition, the individual photographer will often have a website, where images can be viewed.

Listen, I have no issue with Magnum Photos trying to get in on the possibly very lucrative NFT market. Go to it, Magnum, however, given that many of the 75 images ‘dropped’ at the end of June at time of writing are still available for the opening bid of 1.00 ETH (a digital currency equivalent to approx $1000), I wonder if this is indeed something that Magnum thought through.

Let’s have a look at Steve McCurry’s NFT image #51 – ‘Pakistan Border, Afghanistan, 1981’, which sold for the equivalent of about $3000. Were you to purchase a print by Steve McCurry in an edition of one, meaning that you would have the only print of that particular image, what would you pay? Well, it is not an exact science, but, if you look at his limited edition prints on Magnum’s homepage, there is a photograph sold in an edition of 60 in various sizes, which range from about $6000 to $13,500. For the edition in total – buying all the prints – would be the equivalent of being the only person to own the photograph. This would set you back a mere $505,500.

In other words, you can acquire a work by Steve McCurry for your computer screen for $3,000. You can buy one of sixty prints for $6,350 and frame it. Or, you could buy all the prints and be the only person to have it for $505,500.

The print and the NFT are sold with a similar caveat: “This print is for personal usage only, intended for display in the home or other private spaces. For all other uses, such as display in public spaces or institutions, publishing the image online or in print, or any other form of usage, permission must be granted by Magnum Photos.”

In purely commercial terms, NFTs are a new market, another way of skinning the cat for profit. As with all art, the only way to really know if it is worth anything is to look at the resale value. Usually referred to as the secondary market. In other words, what will someone pay for your NFT that you bought for 3 ETH. So far, the secondary market has been very spotty and rather soft. It may evolve, but so far it has not done well.

Who can forget Mr. Sina Estavi, who garnered international attention last March, when he bought an NFT of the first-ever Tweet for approximately $3 million. A year later, he put it up for auction with a reserve price of $48 million, generously offering to donate half to charity, but at the close of the auction, the highest bid was a mere $12,800. If indeed this is the true value set by the secondary market, the value of the world’s first Tweet has dropped a staggering 99.57%.

According to NBC news, quoting sales tracking company DappRadar, global sales of NFTs was approximately $25 billion in 2021, a drop from the $95 billion in 2021. OpenSea – an NFT sale platform said that sales of NFTs peaked in August 2021. The market may yet recover, but it seems Magnum may have been a little late.

As a person who spends a lot of time nursing photographs, it is my view that a photographer’s work has three steps; the composition and making of the photograph; the processing of film or the data file; the final output, which is usually a print. These steps are sacred, they are what the photographer saw in his, or her mind’s eye when clicking the shutter and is executed in full only when the image is presented as intended by the photographer. To me, this cannot be an image on my TV, or computer screen that has been set to my particular palette of colours, contrast, or brightness, or far worse a postage stamp size photo on a not so smart phone.

The jury may be out on NFTs. but, I for one am not buying. I feel sorry for Olivia Arthur, the newly minted President of Magnum. One might wonder, had there not been pressure from the financial backers of Magnum for cash-flow and profit, whether she would have wanted a venture into NFTs as part of her legacy. After all, if after a month a lot of the Magnum NFTs remain unsold, what does that say about the photographers, their work and their credibility. What does it say when Steve McCurry can ‘only’ sell his NFT for about $3000, when being the only one to have one of his prints would set you back about $500,000?

Harbel

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The Humble Homage

I recently wrote about plagiarism.   About the need to pay tribute.  About paying homage to those that inspire us.

I know when you see a lot of photographs, you are likely to borrow, or at least recall certain composition elements, or particular subject matter.   This is as old as time.  Romans copied Greek statues, and basically, it has not changed much since.

Picasso is said to have stolen liberally from his peers and borrowed even more from those he called his friends.  Books have been written about his rivalry with Henri Matisse, and when you see a Juan Gris cubist painting and one nearby by Picasso, you would be fully in your right to think one is the other, and the other the one. 

In photography plagiarism has been discussed widely, and this blog is not so much about that, as it is about how we pay tribute, and are inspired by great photographers.

I had a chance to walk a Marc Riboud retrospective, maybe 10 years ago.  Marc Riboud was a Cartier-Bresson protégée, who broke free from the Master and Magnum, the agency that he founded, to follow his own path.  Riboud spent a lot of time in China around the time of the Cultural Revolution and is responsible for some of the most iconic photographs of China at the time.

Riboud, Marc: Le Petit Lapin
– Shanghai 2002

One of the most unassuming, but genius photographs that he took was indeed in China.  It is titled: Le Petit Lapin – Shanghai 2002 (The Little Rabbit).  As you can see above, it shows a simple white plastic bag, with its handles knotted.  With a little imagination, it is a small rabbit sitting on a table in a Chinese classic garden. 

When I left the show, aside from his most famous photographs, such as the Painter on the Eiffel Tower, or Washington DC 1967, the photograph that stayed with me to this day was the simple plastic bag.

For years after, I kept seeing tied white plastic bags, and I kept thinking that I too could take a photograph that would perhaps be my version of the white rabbit.  I have been at this for years.  Then one day, I was in Aix-en-Provence, and saw what I think is a fair homage to the master.  I don’t place objects, nor do I move things to create composition, I merely observe, focus and press the shutter. Did I get a monkey off my back. Not really. I still see knotted white plastic bags as rabbits.

Harbel: The White Rabbit – Homage to Marc Riboud

So, for what it is worth.  Here is my homage to the great Master, Marc Riboud, who will be an inspiration for the rest of my photographing years.

Mr. Riboud, you may have passed, but your legacy lives on.

Harbel

Remembering Ara Güler – The King of Istanbul

I met him once. He sat in his café-cum-bar at a corner table by the window. He was the belle of the ball, the one that everyone in the know was looking at discreetly, or in some cases staring at wildly. A legend. A celebrity. A man who managed to capture the essence of Istanbul.

Sure, he claimed he was much more than that, when asked. He would talk about all his travels, where he had visited and photographed, how he was hand picked by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum, but the legacy persists: He was the king of Istanbul, the pride and the living visual memory of the great city.

His photographs are atmospheric and truly sensitive to what it means to see Istanbul for what it is and what it was. The cross-roads, the cradle and the mystery that is the front door to Asia, the legendary city of sultans, the gateway, mysterious and wonderful. Any photographer would have given their eyetooth to make some of the photographs that Ara Güler so amazingly did over and over again, day after day. Orhan Pamuk’s words and Ara Güler’s photographs in many ways define Istanbul.

Ara Güler had a great eye and was an early riser. His photographs reflect some of the things you could only possibly experience when rising at dawn and making your way to the port, where your friends and people that you could relate to, allowed you to travel with them on their boats and make photographs of tough lives well lived, witnessed by someone who was there, but was also himself one with them. It seems to me he photographed like the invisible man, making photographs that bear witness and simply shows what daily life was like only a few decades ago in a city that has changed so much.

It always impresses me when photographers have a body of work they are famous for, as opposed to a single image or two. Ara Güler doesn’t have a signature image, at least not one that I would willingly identify as such. I recognize a lot of his images that I saw in his little gallery upstairs from the café in Istanbul, or in his several books. But unlike many of his peers, he created a feeling and an atmosphere with his photographs, which nobody else seems to be able to capture. Many have tried photographing Istanbul at various times over the past 100 or so years, but I always end up comparing them to Ara Güler and I always conclude that they are good, but not quite as good as those made by the King of Istanbul.

He who wanted to be remembered for so much more, will always be the one who photographed Istanbul: Ara Güler, the one who did it better than anyone else.

Ara Güler (August 16, 1928 – October 17, 2018) was fittingly born in Istanbul, and passed away in Istanbul, may he rest in Peace.

 

Harbel

  

The Trouble at Magnum Photos, Manipulated Digital Photographs, and New Investors

• Last year the famous photographer Steve McCurry was caught having digitally manipulated a number of his photographs. He blamed his ‘team’ (Petapixel.com, May 6th, 2016). But what about his other family, his Magnum family?

• Only a few weeks ago, Peter Vik announced he was leaving Magnum Photos, because he refused to sign a new contract with an outside investment group. He left Magnum to protect his freedom, as a photographer (British Journal of Photography, June 15th, 2017).

These two news items may have nothing in common at first glance, but they may be symptomatic of trouble at Magnum Photos and perhaps a warning of things to come.

I have for many, many years been a strong supporter of the legacy that has led Magnum Photos to be a place for photographic independence, where photographers retain control of their photographs, sold for single use only to media far and wide.

When the founders of Magnum came up with the single use policy, it laid the foundation for the livelihoods of many of the best photographers of the past 70 years. The price for this success was of course a certain set of iron-fisted leaders that forced photography in a particular direction.

One of the early drivers was Henri Cartier Bresson (HCB). A fiercely independent photographer, who with a substantial family fortune behind him could afford to be selective in his assignments, and who as luck would have it with his first self-assigned project for Magnum Photos struck gold. HCB was in India to photograph Gandhi. As it happened, this was the day before Gandhi was murdered. HCB went on to cover the funeral leaving the world with some very iconic photographs that were sold to newspapers and magazines far and wide. In some ways, this single assignment cemented the name of Magnum Photos and made it what it has been for the past seven decades.

HCB was the backbone of Magnum Photos for many, many years. He worked hard at critiquing and schooling superb young photographers like Marc Riboud until he was satisfied that they had mastered the HCB esthetic. Shooting in his image, one might say. But strong personalities have their own challenges.

When Kryn Taconis an early Dutch member of Magnum came to Paris after having returned from Algeria, where he had been photographing on the side of independence (and therefore against the French, in the eyes of HCB), Magnum Photos on the specific orders of HCB refused to circulate his photographs through their usual channels, effectively muzzling Taconis. Taconis soon left the collective.

I met Kryn Taconis’ widow a few years ago, around 2002, I think. By then she was in her 90s. She showed me a photograph by HCB. A modest size print of Kashmir, from 1947. The inscribed photograph was HCB’s gesture of contrition for having effectively censored Kryn Taconis out of Magnum. He had come to visit, in person, admitting he was wrong to block Taconis’ work, by letting his own personal politics get in the way. He was a dollar short and a couple of decades late. Kryn Taconis had passed away in 1979.

In modern times, when Steve McCurry was found to have manipulated his photographs to perfection, he blamed his ‘team’. McCurry made a lame argument that he was not shooting on assignment, and had not supervised sufficiently, etc. Had there been only one of these manipulated photographs, it might have been OK. Write it off to assistant enthusiasm, perhaps? But there are several internet-sleuths, who have uncovered further examples by simply comparing photographs by McCurry that are in circulation on the web. Does this taint all of McCurry’s work?  You decide….

The final product

The original image

Reuters and AP and several other agencies, including National Geographic, all seem to endorse and enforce a code of conduct: Mr. Gerry Hershorn, who until 2014 was Photo Editor for Reuters, put it this way: “Well, there are … some very accepted practices. If you take a picture and somebody’s skin tone is purple by mistake, it’s very common for a photographer to bring the skin tone back to a proper skin tone color. A photographer is never allowed to change content. You can’t add information, you can’t take away things.”

Not long ago, AP severed all ties to Narciso Contreras. He had digitally removed another photographer’s camera from one of his photographs, taken in Syria. AP acted swiftly and scrubbed their website of all Contreras photographs. Santiago Lyon, VP and Director of Photography said in a statement: “AP’s reputation is paramount and we react decisively and vigorously when it is tarnished by actions in violation of our ethics code. Deliberately removing elements from our photographs is completely unacceptable.”

Don McCullin, one of the last greats of photojournalism – and not a member of Magnum – put it this way: “Digital manipulation of photographs is ‘hideous’ and has left photographers able to ‘lie’ to the public by doctoring images. Pictures have been ‘hijacked’ by digital, with old-fashioned skills of the dark room eclipsed by computer generated colour.”

When it comes to Steve McCurry, Magnum Photos has chosen to remain virtually silent.

It seems that when the big names in photography make mistakes, like HCB with his politics, or Steve McCurry with his digitally perfected colour photographs, there are different rules. HCB may be dead, but I do not think he would be happy about Magnum Photos taking on outside investors, and starting to lose control of the collective he founded. Likewise, had he been alive, I am pretty sure he would have asked Steve McCurry to leave Magnum Photos.

But, if Steve McCurry were asked to leave Magnum Photos, what would the new investors say? What would losing a revenue stream from work by what used to be one of the great photojournalists of his time? This may explain the silence from a usually outspoken Martin Parr, who just stepped down as President of Magnum.

For all its faults, Magnum Photos may be the last refuge for some of the best photographers in the world, who might otherwise have had to shoot weddings and corporate annual reports to survive. In a world where a cell phone video by an anonymous witness, has replaced professional photojournalism in most media outlets, it is tough to be a photojournalist.

I worry…. If books are anything to go by, Magnum Photos is doing everything it can to invent new revenue streams. There is a TV series in development, and I understand that there are discussions about how best to leverage the brand. With the new investors in place, who will be looking for a return on their investment, can coasters and coffee mugs be far behind? AND in refusing to tackle the McCurry issue, has Magnum opened the door to doubt about authenticity, and legitimacy of itself, and its collective of great photographers?

Harbel,
San Sebastian

See more on my website: harbel.com

Images are borrowed from the web and are attributed to Steve McCurry, and are for illustration purposes only, no rights owned or implied.