Bring it Home by Barry Sutton
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About this series
Bring it Home by photographer Barry Sutton is a retrospective body of works organized into 4 releases. Each release includes 10 unique 1/1 works from his body of work. "To distill a life’s work into 10 images is an absurd task. By design, much of the story remains untold. These are the images, like chapters in the story of a life, that have highlighted my career," explains the artist and goes on:
I don’t remember my parents taking pictures, but they did. Lots of them. My childhood was well documented and thanks to my mother, nearly all of these memories exist in photographs and 16mm films.
When I first picked up a camera, a Polaroid, I was hooked. The immediacy of the experience and beauty of the black and white instant print gripped my imagination. I had been studying graphic design at the time, but this was something different. I soon returned to Los Angeles, and began this journey for which I had no road map.
My camera would sometimes follow my feet, and other times guide me, from wandering the streets of Paris to the underground nightclubs in LA, from journeys along the highways to making portraits of friends.
What began as an experiment, evolved into a 30+ year career and a lifelong obsession with making pictures.
There are four planned collections for Bring it Home. Each selection of 10 images includes a curation of some of my earliest experiments with photography in the 1980s and key works from the decades in between. The first collection- Genesis, includes photographs of the west coast music scene in the early 90’s, street scenes in the aughts, memories from the road and recent portraiture.
Beside the obvious chronological sequencing, the connection between these works may be found somewhere between mystery and wonder. Why am I drawn to certain subjects? What stokes my imagination are those moments that are beyond description, when the universe invites me to witness its grace, when all that is in front of me aligns to form an impossibly beautiful experience that takes my breath away. Exhaling as I press the shutter. It is said that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Opening the door to further examination and interpretation is the gift we leave to the viewer.
Finally, as a new generation of collectors discovers photography, I am excited to include the complete set of signed and numbered archival prints with each NFT purchase– the physical manifestation of the original intent, and a thing of beauty and value in and of itself.
Photographers are collectors, constantly looking, seeing, organizing the world, fixing precise moments of time and space into memory. Bring it home!
Artist Bio
Barry Sutton came into the NFT space with a splash. Sutton is a photographer for over 30 years, his work is in the private collections of Calvin Klein and David Geffen, and has appeared in numerous publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Ocean Drive, Newsweek and NYTimes T Magazine. Throughout his career, Barry has also dedicated considerable time to personal, passion projects.
After learning about NFTs and studying the market for a few months, he launched his genesis collection 96° in the Shade on Aug 11, 2021 with no marketing or pre-launch publicity. With the support of photographer Justin Aversano and uber-collector gmoney, the collection of 100 works sold out in three days. Since its launch, the project has achieved a sort of cult status among collectors and has been a fixture on the top 50 all-time list of NFT photography projects.
Photographer: Barry Sutton
Twitter: @barrylsutton
Instagram: @barrylsutton
Foundation: Bring it Home
Photos copyright Barry Sutton
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.