On March 1st, the 20th anniversary of Driven By Boredom, I released my first NFT. They were animated gifs of the Driven By Boredom logo. I released it primarily because the NFT community feels in a lot of ways like the early days of the internet and the community that exists around early 2000 websites that were essentially blogs before anyone was calling them blogs. But I also released it because I knew I wanted to make photography NFTs, but I wanted to do a trial run before I did them and I think I learned a lot.

I did 3 editions. I did a 1/1 that I sold for 2ETH which at the time was a little over $3000. I made it for me, I just wanted it in my collection, I didn’t think anyone would actually buy it. I then made an edition of 5 for .2ETH which was about $300 and then finally an edition of 20 at .02ETH for about $30. Amazingly the 1/1 was pretty much the first thing to sell. I sold a few of the other two as well, but I realized a few important things 1) Collectors want 1/1s 2) It’s probably a little too early for a lot of my fans. I had some real trouble trying to on board people. 3) Cheap NFTs are a hard sell because the gas fees to buy them are often too high to justify. Why would you pay $40 to own a $30 NFT? 

After the sale I took all that ETH and bought other NFTs with it. I wanted to be part of the community. I also started working on my next NFT. I didn’t see a big space for still photography yet and I thought animation was the way to go. I made a series of 5 adult themed animated photo NFTs and was getting ready to drop them in April when crypto crashed. It just didn’t seem like a good time. And then I waited longer, and waited longer, and I kept putting it all off because I was scared it wouldn’t do well and I didn’t want to make mistakes on the blockchain that would haunt me years later. You can take down a blog post, you can’t remove an NFT that you don’t own from the blockchain. 

During those months of me worrying about what to do and when to do it I have lost most of my ETH, learned more and I have seen photography NFTs become collectable finally. It’s a lot of landscapes that seem to be popular, but the idea that people want still photography got me very excited. I still plan on releasing my animated NFTs in the future, but with the Gathering of the Juggalos happening this week I felt like it was the perfect time to launch my first NFT with the biggest project of my career, the 12 years I have spent documenting juggalos.

The first girl I ever kissed was a juggalo. I mean she was really a punk but she liked the Insane Clown Posse. A lot of my punk friends did for some reason. They weren’t great musically but neither was most punk, but they were also hilarious and listening to them felt like watching a terrible B horror movie. They were the sonic equivalent to a Troma film. But when I went to college I didn’t know anyone who liked them and I didn’t really think of the band again until 2010.

When “Miracles” came out and everyone was making fun of it I found myself defending ICP. I was trying to explain that they were in on the joke and you just didn’t get it. At some point I Tweeted about how I wanted to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos that year and my editor at the Village Voice, Camille Dodero responded. She was in and we were going. We were willing to pay our own way but by the time we were done it was a cover story and changed both of our careers forever.

Since then I haven’t missed a single Gathering of the Juggalos. I have covered the event for dozens and dozens of clients including a lot of big ones. Of course I did, the Voice, LA Weekly, a cover for the Riverfront Times and a bunch of other Alt Weekly coverage, but also Rolling Stone, Vice, Playboy, Hustler, Kerrang, Daily Beast, Boing Boing, TMZ, and countless others. The last ever episode of @Midnight had a segment on my juggalo photos and The Late Show ran one of my photos last year. A thread I did about juggalos became a trending moment on Twitter and a photo I took of a butt with clown makeup on it has haunted me for years. I took the most famous photo of ICP without their make up and was the only photographer there when juggalos attacked Tila Tequila. If you do a google image search for juggalos it’s absolutely filled with my photos. I would guess that if you have ever seen a photo from the Gathering of the Juggalos there is probably a 40% chance that I took it. 

Long story short is that this is the most exhaustive project of my career and my life wouldn’t be close to the same without juggalos. They have welcomed me into their family and while I don’t listen to the music very often, I certainly feel like I am a juggalo myself after all these years… at least juggalo adjacent. I feel like this is a perfect place to get started with with my NFT journey and it’s a good way to give back to some of the juggalos in my photos.

I am holding 25% of the sale price of every juggalo portrait I sell for the subject of the photo. I own all these images and I don’t need to do that, but I feel it’s the only ethical thing to do. If it’s a photo of a bunch of people or a celebrity or if there are some people in the background of a shot I won’t be giving that out, but any primary person will have two years to claim it and I will be doing my best to contact them.

Now let’s talk about how the series works. There will be 17 drops (17 is a very important number for juggalos) and each series will have 5 1/1 images each with the exception the first and last series. The “genesis” drop will have 10 images and the last one is a surprise. I have no timeline for the series other than I would like to time the ending with my book release. 

I have a lot of ideas for this project if it is successful with both physical and digital rewards for the collectors of my work and some fun ideas that I don’t even want to talk about yet, but even if the project isn’t the hit I am hoping for I will still complete the series. I plan on building a website with information on every NFT I ever make at some point but I need to sell some of these things first. But I think NFTs are the future and even if a lot of the buzz dies out I will keep going. I am in this for the long run, just like I was when I started blogging more than 20 years ago.

Lastly we should talk about pricing. I think NFTs are very hard to price, but I know that if I was doing a 1/1 print I would sell it for several thousand dollars, but I also don’t really know how to do a 1/1 as a photographer. It would be like selling a negative which is something I would never do. NFTs give you a way to do that as a photographer that we never had before. So I do value these “jpgs”, as people like to derisively call them, fairy high, but I also want to sell them so I am hoping around .2ETH is a good place to start. As the series go I will be raising or lowering prices depending on demand but 9 of the 10 NFTs in this drop are going to be .217 ETH, honoring that lucky juggalo number once again. I also will be selling the first NFT in the series, a portrait of the Insane Clown Posse, for .517 ETH as it will be officially the first photo NFT I ever release. I don’t know if it will sell, but I am very glad to hold onto it in my collection if it doesn’t.

If you want to learn how to get cryptocurrency in order to buy one of these, you can read my last NFT post for a breakdown of how to do it. The easiest way is to to download an app called MetaMask and buy ETH directly from there. If you live in NY state or some other places with terrible crypto laws you will need to download CoinBase and buy the ETH there first.  You will need to buy more than you think you need because you will have to pay a fee to transfer it to MetaMask and another fee to mint the NFT. I am not exactly sure how much because it depends on gas prices, but they tend to be cheaper when it’s late night in the US. 

One final thing I am gonna drop down here because I know the environmental impact of NFTs is something people are concerned about… just do me a favor and google how much energy YouTube uses. You wouldn’t attack someone for making a YouTube video so don’t attack an artist for making an NFT. 

Okay, that’s it. Take a look at my Juggalo NFTs here. Happy collecting! 

 

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