RISE & FALL. HERE PRESS
Book Publication / Conceptual Art Project
In 2012 during the waning days of print media, MICHAEL SCHMELLING accepted an assignment from WIRED to photograph a man named Bruce Wagner, host of a self-produced show on YouTube called "The Bitcoin Show." With the price of the obscure cryptocurrency hovering around $3.25, Schmelling shot Wagner at an ad-hoc television studio in Midtown and then outside the first restaurant in the New York City to accept Bitcoin as payment. Wagner was a true believer and when the shoot ended, he implored Schmelling to take whatever fee he was making and invest it entirely in the decentralized, digital coins being mined on the fringes of the internet. Had Schmelling taken Wagner's advice, the $500 day-rate he was paid for the job would have a current market evaluation just north of $16,000,000.
Schmelling's loss is our gain. A decade later, he returned to the work, which he felt had begun to take on a new weight. In Rise & Fall (Here Press) he recontextualizes the photos, turning hero shots and outtakes into a propulsive meditation on reality and artifice, and the arbitrary nature of what we assign value to in the digital era. Mirroring the mining of BitCoins, the resulting photography book / conceptual art project is priced to rise and fall with the market. Three years in, after nearly cratering at a low of 57 cents, Rise & Fall has rebounded strongly with a current market evaluation of $21.90. Like Mark Wagner, we implore you to invest HERE .
Credits:
Michael Schmelling
|Creator
Michael Schmelling is the author of eight photo books, including The Plan (J+L Books) which was included in the ICP Triennial; Your Blues (The Ice Plant / Skinnerbox), his first one-person museum exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago; and Rise & Fall (Here Press). As a graphic designer and editor, he has collaborated on over two dozen publications with artists, writers, musicians and photographers, including: The Dennis Hopper Trust; Hilton Als; Sharon Van Etten; Friedrich Kunath; Sara VanDerBeek; Ahndraya Parlato; Richard Maxwell; Amanda Shires; Amen Dunes; Racquet; and Odd Future.