Two hundred faces
For a year I followed Justin Aversano's Moments of the Unknown one polaroid at a time, and bid my way into just over two hundred of them. This is why.
Justin Aversano →
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 recognised photography projects in this whole space, and he later founded Quantum Art. His work has hung at Christie's. He is, by any measure, one of the artists who made the case that photography belongs on-chain.
The daily ritual
Moments of the Unknown was different 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 pattern in how they frame a stranger, the year of their life that the run quietly records. That is what a series gives you that a single piece cannot.
The along7 of it
Here is the part I have never quite been able to explain away as coincidence. I like to think of the run as bookended by two dates that mean something to me: it opens near the birthday of Ethereum itself, the chain that made all of this possible, and it closes on the seventh of April. Four, seven. Along, seven. along7. My name and my number, sitting at the end of a series I followed one face at a time for a year. I did not plan that. You cannot plan that. But I collect a lot on feeling, and the feeling here was that the thread had been waiting for me to pick it up.
The room
Every polaroid is here, on its own wall, with its own on-chain story. Start anywhere and pull the thread.