One Shot, One Life: Justin Aversano's Permanent Impermanence

"That's the day I gave up."

August 11, 2013. In a restaurant with his family, Justin Aversano hears his mother say the cancer has returned everywhere and that she may have only a few months left to live. His world sinks into stunned silence, everything ringing, everything distant.

He is eleven months into the Birthday Project, one portrait each day on someone’s birthday. He considers stopping. She will not let him. In that same room she finds a stranger celebrating a birthday and insists he make that day’s picture.

“She didn’t let me fail.” Justin tells me.

This moment crystallizes everything about Justin Aversano: art isn't separate from survival. It is survival. And sometimes the dying teach us the most about living. This is a story about confronting death by celebrating life, and about the artistic discipline that makes that celebration possible.

Before he was an artist, Justin Aversano wanted to be a doctor. The logic was simple and desperate: ninth grade, mother diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer, eight years of battle ahead.

"I had no idea what the fuck cancer was," he says. So he dreamed of trying to cure it, to save her.

He found himself reading philosophy books in his parents' Long Island restaurant. Shamanism, poetry, history, everything but the task at hand. Self-medicating with mushrooms and weed while watching his siblings struggle with substances. A family dispersing into their private pain.

Things got worse when his best friend was killed by an intoxicated driver who happened to be Justin's sister's best friend. "Shakespearean tragedy," he calls it. The essay he wrote about his best friend, about loss and inspiration and the need to create, got him into art school. Rejected from medical school, accepted to SVA. The universe had chosen for him.

Death, it seemed, would make him an artist instead of a doctor.

The Birthday Project began as a way to confront death and celebrate life. He would photograph someone every single day on their birthday. Life, celebrated daily. One Polaroid per person. One shot. No redos.

This constraint was as much philosophical as it was technical. Each portrait had to matter because there would be no second chance. Like life itself. No rewind, no replay. You show up, you're present, you click once. The image is what it is.

His mother became his fiercest collaborator. "Every moment is a gift, every day is a gift," she taught him. The Birthday Project translated her philosophy into visual form: 365 gifts of attention, 365 small rebellions against the dark.

By 2016, two years after his mother's death, Justin was drowning in mushrooms. Microdosing daily, trying to heal, but finding the medicine had become poison; he describes it as "Taking more from me than it was giving."

Then Peru called. First time leaving America. Machu Picchu at 4 AM, hiking alone in darkness to reach the Temple of the Sun before the tourist buses. Only two others made it that early. For two hours, he had the sacred site to himself.

That's when the voice came. Wind hitting his back, whisper clear: "Don't do ayahuasca. It's not for you." When the universe speaks, Justin Aversano listens, so he didn’t do ayahuasca.

Later that day, back in Cusco, he saw a sign for San Pedro ceremonies. The cactus medicine, not the vine. He went.

"That changed my whole fucking life."

During the ceremony, he finally felt a sense of closure. A shaman with feathers and sage cleansed years of paranoia from his system. All that accumulated fear from trauma, washed away. For the first time in a long time, clarity. Not the artificial clarity of substances, but actual presence.

"It was like holding the hand of God," he says.

Saint Peter, the cactus's namesake, walking him gently forward.

Film photography isn't just Justin's medium. It's his theology. In art school, he fell in love with the alchemy of it: light hitting silver, chemistry creating permanence. But more than magic, he loved the discipline.

Twin Flames: one roll of medium format per session with twins. Ten, maybe twelve exposures to capture a complete portrait. Smoke & Mirrors: one roll per tarot archetype, and the subjects choose their own final image, not him.

"You got one shot, one opportunity," he says, quoting Eminem without irony. "No redos, no do-overs. Fucking get it."

This constraint encourages presence. His portrait sessions last ten minutes. Subjects love him for it. He jokes that if Time Magazine ever hired him to photograph the president, he'd be perfect. Done before anyone could complain about waiting.

But here's the crucial part: he keeps the mistakes. Every project contains at least one failed image, and he includes it.

"I love the days that I fuck up and I love the days I do my best," he insists.

 Like a market that can't always go up, like life itself. The failures teach as much as successes.

"We just wanna show our presence," Justin says, con

necting cave paintings to blockchain technology in one breath. "We wanna validate our presence."

This primal need to mark existence drives everything. Twin Flames launched as NFTs on Valentine's Day 2021, transforming not just Justin's career but photography's place in crypto art. He co-founded Quantum to ensure photographers had infrastructure in this new world. SaveArtSpace put artists on billboards globally, physical marking of digital presence.

His latest, Moments of the Unknown, draws inspiration from NASA's Golden Record. Carl Sagan's attempt to show Earth as one place, humanity as one species.

"Why are we fighting over crumbs on this fucking Earth when there could be a whole universe we could explore together?"

The blockchain becomes another form of permanence, a contemporary cave painting. Every transaction, every mint, every collect. All saying the same ancient thing: we were here. We mattered. This happened.

"Coming full circle to wanting to be a doctor," Justin muses, "but coming around to an alternative medicine way with shamanism and plant medicine and art."

His new in-progress project, Resilience, hopes to capture 1,000 cancer survivors in tintype. The most permanent form of photography, each image a unique metal plate. He records three-question interviews while shooting. The proceeds go to cancer research. His father, also a survivor, will be photographed on Justin's birthday this September.

He's developing 3D portraits for blind people, searching for AI tools that won't distort faces. The boy who wanted to cure disease now documents survival, creates tactile memories, building community through shared struggle.

"I feel healed in a way," he says, "where now it's about connection and humanity as a species and oneness."

The ambition that surprises even him: winning a Nobel Peace Prize through art. Not for glory, but as proof that creativity can heal at planetary scale.

The collectors who saw it early include @gmoneyNFT, who brought him into Flamingo DAO and "jumpstarted my career." Also critical: @punk6529, @GalaxyDigital, @ordinals_guy who stuck around "at my peak bottom" after the crash, and his friend Zach who collected pre-NFT when Justin needed it most. Gallerist Ed from Superchief gave him his first real show. Gina from The Storefront Project took the earliest chance.

Currently inspiring him: Bryan Brinkman for his community-building and kindness, Die With The Most Likes for being "fucking hilarious and real and raw," and Sasha Stiles for "killing it in the art world," turning poetry into fine art. He also shouts out @wsavas and @VanArman, "OG AI, deserves more credit."

I ask what he wishes people understood about his work. He laughs, still scrolling Twitter during our call, looking for artist friends he might've forgotten to mention.

"I don't know. I'm still figuring it out too as we go."

The boy who couldn't sit still in his parents' restaurant still can't sit still. But now that restless energy serves something infinite. One shot at a time. No redos. Every frame a small victory against the dark, every click saying: we were here, we loved, we witnessed.

For future episodes of the Weekly Dose of ART, Justin Aversano recommends @bryanbrinkman, @toadswiback, and @sashastiles. Justin was recommended by @delta_sauce.