The following article was published in NFT Magazine September 2024.

Portrait 51 NFT Magazine 2.2024

Barry Sutton is an American artist and educator who uses photography and artificial intelligence to ask questions “about our notions of beauty and the nature of truth,” according to his website. His photographic work over the last 30 years has focused primarily on youth culture. Working with a wide range of AI tools, he seeks to develop a new photographic language. He likes to engage in discussions about the intersection of photography and synthetic imagery.

A regular speaker at conferences all around the world, his figurative and conceptual work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, London, Rome, and Brussels. Sutton’s work has been published in Vogue, New York Times T-Magazine, and Newsweek, among others. His 2021 retrospective “96° in the Shade” was the first fashion and lifestyle project to be stored as NFTs on the blockchain. His acclaimed synthetic photography projects include “Traces of Truth,” “Rapid Transit,” and “Rad and Mythologies I & II.” The “Mythologies” prints are represented by the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Sutton is also the Chair of the MPS Fashion Photography graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

In “Olympia,” he explores the beauty of sport through the lens of cultural mythologies, offering both a whimsical commentary on the development of the Games and a reflection on the wider societal issues brought to the fore by the Olympics. The works appear on Verse, a platform for contemporary NFT art.

We spoke exclusively to Barry about his role as a photographer, the current Olympia series, and a terrible accident:

Barry, what do you describe yourself as? Are you a photographer or more of an artist?

I would reframe it this way. I started my career doing graphic design until I discovered photography. Since then, my art practice has been entirely around making photographs. Being a photographer was always part science and part visual artist. I think we’re in a unique moment where, because of smartphones and social media, as a society we’ve created and seen so many photographs that we’ve hit a tipping point of overconsumption. I’m going to get a lot of pushback on this, but I think in this post-truth world, the photograph has lost much of its intrinsic power. I’m still making photographs every day, but my art practice is currently dominated by algorithmic methods and AI, which is incredibly exciting to me as an artist. It’s like dipping a paintbrush into the DNA of every photograph ever created. In a beautiful twist, famed photography purveyors Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles now represent my synthetic work Mythologies in print.

Your “Olympia” series couldn’t be more topical. Tell us the story of how these truly spectacular motifs came about.

I am a huge sports fan. As a young photographer, I had a secret dream of being a sports photographer, shooting professional soccer in England, but music and fashion pulled me in another direction. I did, of course, make a career of making photographs, and to take on the theme of the Olympic Games creating synthetic images has been an incredibly challenging and also liberating experience on so many levels. My aim with Olympia is to inspire in the viewer the kind of raw emotion I got from watching the Olympics as a kid—the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Utilizing AI, there is the possibility of widening the narrative possibilities. I wanted to look at sports through the lens of contemporary mythology, weaving together the physical and emotional aesthetic of sport with important social and existential issues like the migration of refugees, gun violence, war, poverty, inequality, and racism.

What percentage of AI is in the Olympia motifs and what percentage is Barry?

Working with AI is a process of developing a relationship with a collaborator. There are times I can work for a month iterating on a single output, and there are other times when the initial outputs are more or less exactly what I was trying to create. More often it is a process of having strong intentions and also leaning into the possibility of chance, giving the machine more latitude to extend my vision into a new place.

You’ve been working as a photographer for a very long time. How did you come to Web3 Space?

I was introduced to crypto in 2017, but wasn’t looking at the emerging NFT projects. So, when I first learned about NFTs in the spring of 2021, I immediately understood the possibilities. Through that summer, I began assembling a series of photographs I had made in Miami Beach between 2003 and 2007, which became 96° in the Shade, my first NFT collection. Through a series of very fortunate introductions, including visionary collector and investor Gmoney, some CryptoPunks collectors heard about it, and when I launched the work in August 2021, it sold out on release. In fact, Mike Hager is one of my biggest collectors of this work and has been a huge supporter of my work ever since, so this feature really feels like we’re coming full circle.

Do you have role models in Space? Which artists do you admire – and perhaps even collect?

There are a few people I really look up to in the space. One of my childhood friends, artist Kevin Abosch, has been a huge influence in my growth as an artist and someone who I respect immensely. There are so many artists in the space whose work I am really drawn to that I am afraid I will leave too many people out if I start listing them. It’s just an honor to be a member of the family of artists who are producing work day in and day out, and supporting each other in this strange, life-changing, and sometimes maddening Web3 space.

Let’s take a look at your wallet: Tell us what your most prized NFTs are?

Probably my favorite work that I have collected in the NFT space is Synchrodogs' synthetic work Overture and Kevin Abosch’s Civics. Iñigo Bilboa’s work Fluxus is also a favorite, as well as Jesse Drakler’s Crash. I also just picked up a beautiful video work by Dancevatar called Morphing Phantogram that I could watch over and over again—just enchanting.

And then there’s the story of N.W.A.: the band had a massive impact on the music genre of rap. Dr. Dre, for example, is a former member of the band. You had a shoot with N.W.A. about 30 years ago and took countless photos with the artists—which are really of historical value. What terrible things happened then?

Well, you’ve really led me directly into the heartache chapter of this story! I was lucky to be invited to make portraits of Gangsta’ Rap artists N.W.A. when they were recording Straight Outta Compton, which would go on to multi-platinum status and define the genre for many years. They had just returned from a gun shop with these frightening weapons—pistol grip shotguns, semi-automatic rifles—and they were excited to feature them in the photos, since they could never have used them in any commercial shoots, pardon the pun. Unfortunately, the entire body of work was destroyed by the U.S. Postal Service en route to NY from my storage facility in Miami. It was a heartbreaking event, but I still had a few prints and one of the proof sheets from that day. A few of these images were sold in 2021 as NFTs, and there is a group shot available on Foundation.

In one of my early art classes as a young child, the teacher destroyed our work at the end of the day. We were all shocked and in tears, but he reminded us that we were artists and would make more work again. So, I’m philosophical about it—he ended up being right.