Click on image to see collections
Obscura is a photography organization that aspires to build community and empower photographers to create their dream projects by bringing back the concept of the photographic
commission. Using funding models made possible through blockchain technology and NFTs, Obscura aims to provide commissions, grants, mentorship, education, and partnerships to artists and organizations in the NFT Photography space.
Founded in 2021 by Alejandro Cartagena, Tony Herrera, and Cooper Ray, Obscura enables photographers to pursue their creative endeavors through the creation of NFT Native photography. Obscura is a model of how we think of photography in the digital age and a means of addressing a long-standing gap in available funding from traditional art institutions with a growing supply of practitioners. Distinguished by a patron-based financial and service model, Obscura offers the opportunity for photographers to create new bodies of work that have their first iteration in the world as NFTs.
As the only business of its kind, Obscura continues to emerge as an innovative force- advancing creative autonomy and living wages for photographers and the future of the art world.
ON VIEW NOW: The Guy Bourdin Estate
The Guy Bourdin Estate Bourdin’s work feels startlingly contemporary. It hasn’t aged. If anything, it’s better than much of what followed it. - Matthew Schneier, New York Times
In the second half of the 20th century, French photographer Guy Bourdin amassed one of the most enduring visual legacies in fashion photography. As a leading photographer for Vogue and other top fashion magazines, the artist spent decades cultivating a provocative and radical vision that continues to manifest to this day in the work of contemporary practitioners. It should be noted that it’s exceedingly rare that the work of a fashion photographer crosses into the realm of fine art, which is notable when we consider that Bourdin’s prints grace the halls of globally renowned collections such as Tate, MoMA, The Getty Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among many others.
In Bourdin’s photographs we find playgrounds for the eye to explore. Bursts of highly saturated color and playful compositional arrangements went firmly against the grain of the work produced by his contemporaries. While the principal goal of the fashion photographer was to make their subject matter appear beautiful and elegant, Bourdin sought to make the photographs themselves fashionable, and to create a type of image that held its own modicum of desire to have, to own, and to show off.
Bourdin’s practice was one that made up its own rules while exploring the arenas of Surrealism, theatricality, absurdism, and sublimity. To the extent that a photographer’s job is to show viewers interpretations of the world, Bourdin’s pictures crafted worlds in which there was no such thing as ordinary, and that all visions were cloaked in alluring and provocative sexuality. The genius that is stamped upon the legacy of Guy Bourdin is found in his inventiveness, enthusiasm, and fearlessness, qualities that define great art, great fashion, and great erotisicism in equal measures.