Justin Aversano is a photographer from New York. He trained at the School of Visual Arts, made his name with Twin Flames, a portrait series of one hundred sets of twins that became one of the most recognized photography projects in this whole space, and he later founded Quantum Art. His work has hung at Christie's. By any measure he is one of the artists who made the case that photography belongs on-chain.

The daily ritual

Moments of the Unknown was a different animal from Twin Flames. It came as a long run of polaroids, released and auctioned on a daily rhythm, each one a single face caught in a single frame. I did not set out to collect two hundred of them. I set out to watch one, and then the next day there was another, and the day after that another, and somewhere in there watching turned into a habit I could not put down.

Why I stayed

Just over two hundred polaroids later, Moments of the Unknown is the deepest single holding in this collection. People ask why one project and not a spread. The honest answer is that depth is its own kind of looking. When you hold two hundred faces by the same hand you stop seeing individual pictures and start seeing the person behind the camera, the way they frame a stranger, the year of a life the run quietly records. That is what a series gives you that a single piece never can.

Four, seven

There is a coincidence in the dates I could not let go of. The run I followed lines up, close enough, with two dates that mean something to me. It opens around Ethereum's own birthday, the chain that made any of this possible, and it closes on the seventh of April. Four, seven. Along, seven. along7. I did not plan that, and you cannot plan that. I collect on feeling, and this one felt like a thread that had been waiting for me to pick it up.

New York, April 7

And then it stopped being a coincidence on a screen. I met Justin in person, in New York, on the seventh of April. The along7 date, and the man behind two hundred faces I had studied one at a time, standing right in front of me. You spend a year bidding on a stranger's photographs at midnight and you quietly build a version of him in your head. Meeting the real one, on that day of all days, was the moment this stopped being a collection and started being people.

You spend a year collecting a stranger's photographs, then shake his hand on the one date that spells your own name.

The room

Every polaroid is here, on its own wall, with its own on-chain story. Start anywhere and pull the thread.