Vitalik Video Grid

About this piece: Most portraits from a photo shoot never see the light of day, and portraits of Vitalik barely exist. I wanted to change all that. This grid presents 18 videos of the same group of tight portraits, each video changing at a different rate so they’re never perfectly in sync. The ultimate effect is a new kind of portrait altogether.

About the shoot: My shoot with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2018 was one of the strangest I’ve ever had. We shot in a tiny garage below a secret house in San Francisco. Vitalik and a few others were gathered upstairs. I don’t know if they were hatching crypto plans or playing parlor games, but there was laughter, raucous shouting and loud thudding on the floor above while we were setting up.

I pride myself on my ability to put people at ease, to draw out genuine moments, and I’ve never felt so incompetent. My small talk, even about blockchain, went nowhere. Same for getting natural, relaxed body language. Ironically, I think this difficulty helped us capture the real Vitalik: he’s an enigma. We got these unexpected moments — deep, odd, expressive, mysterious — that convey what he’s really like. He was game for anything. He was real enough to be himself and not fake comfort. He can’t suddenly become conventional for a photoshoot.

With the rising significance of blockchain and the disruptive nature of cryptocurrency, Vitalik might be the portrait subject of mine who ends up with the greatest long-term impact on the world. Since NFTs are based on the Ethereum blockchain, I feel there’s a strange meta loop in an NFT of the Ethereum creator. And these are just about the only professional portraits of him.