Vitalik, Assembling and Disassembling

About this piece: Having grown up in the 1970s and ‘80s, I have a deep affection for the pixelated aesthetic. Assembling Vitalik tile by tile references the digital nature of cryptocurrency and the blockchain. The brief appearance of the full portrait in the middle of the piece, only to be disassembled again, suggests the enigmatic nature of Vitalik himself.

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.