Art That Emerges: Dave Krugman's Generative Photography

By Justin Wetch

Dave Krugman was supposed to be in woodworking class. He showed up late, every saw station was already taken, and the instructor sent him next door to a small shack in the woods. There was a sign on the door that said please knock, development in process. He knocked. A voice on the other side said just a minute. Through the door he could hear running water.

When the door finally opened, the room behind it was lit red, quiet, washed in the sound of water moving through trays. Images were rising out of white paper as the silver flipped in the developing baths. He hadn't taken any of them. He just stood there watching.

"It was the closest thing to magic that I've ever experienced," he says.

He still has the first print he ever made in that room, rowboats stacked along the lake, black and white, dialed up high in contrast. Decades later, his entire body of work is still organized around that first encounter. An image arriving, on its own, out of a process. The photographer's job is to set the conditions and wait.

Dave grew up in Needham, outside Boston. His father was a technologist by trade and a hobbyist photographer on the side, and every night he'd sit between his two kids and read aloud, sister on the left, Dave on the right. Watership Down. Lord of the Rings. The science fiction shelf, end to end. Dave doodled on tracing paper while the worlds rendered in his head, building, he says now, "this visual system within my mind at a very young age."

The cameras came after, and he never had to learn the language from scratch. His grandfather and father had both been hobbyists, and he inherited a stack of equipment that he still uses. He went to BU for psychology, which would prove unexpectedly useful as a lens on social platforms. The day he graduated, he moved to New York. "New York has a gravity," he says. "Some people fall into that orbit. And if your orbit is close enough, you eventually crash into this place, and you never leave."

His first job in the city was retouching for Annie Leibovitz.

The cave-genius myth dies fast inside a working studio. Annie's setup, when Dave was there, ran on a team of many: archivists, retouchers, lighting experts, set designers, first and second assistants, the whole creative engine. Annie was the captain of it. Dave watched all of that and recalibrated. Great work, he learned, is collaborative. The starving recluse is a story we tell about artists, not how they actually live.

He spent hours scanning her archives, line by pixel line, picking dust off negatives that included some of the most iconic frames in the medium. He held the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Rolling Stone negative in his hands. 

The other thing those years gave him was a respect for old glass. The lenses he inherited from his grandfather and father were ground from a kind of optical material that nobody manufactures anymore. He builds what he calls Franken cameras, vintage glass on hyper-modern mirrorless bodies, because nobody can replicate the result from a downloaded preset. "You can't fake this stuff," he says.

In 2011, while still at Annie's, he watched a wave of photo apps flood the early iPhones. Hipstamatic. Tumblr. A dozen others. One of them was Instagram. Most people treated it as a photo-sharing toy. Dave saw something else.

"This is the printing press for photographers," he remembers thinking. He's still using the framing now. Every so often in human history, the means of distribution shifts, and what looks like a product is actually a media revolution. Gutenberg, radio, television, the internet. A pocket camera on an always-on global network, he realized, was turning every cellphone owner into a publisher.

He moved fast. Meetups in parks and bars, after-hours access to the Metropolitan Museum in exchange for reach, audience built through what we'd now call influencer marketing, before the term existed. The work led him into advertising, then to freelance, then to founding ALLSHIPS.

When COVID emptied his calendar of every in-person community he'd built, the conversations he was having online started circling around blockchain, and the language sounded familiar. New network, new distribution, but with a difference Instagram couldn't offer: object-hood. Assets that could function as a binding force for online communities instead of evaporating into a feed. The deal with Instagram, in his view, had been a hard one for creators. Onchain, there was an alternate path.

He started minting in 2020. His first sales were around five hundred dollars. In 2022, his project Drip Drop launched, and his since done over 500 hundred ETH in volume across five hundred collectors, giving him years of creative runway and let him fund work no commercial client would ever have funded.

Years into all of this, Dave heard the generative artist Jeff Davis define generative art as art that emerges from a system. The system, Davis pointed out, doesn't have to be code. It just has to be a set of rules. Some of the earliest generative pieces were instruction sets, recipes for making the work or experiencing it.

Dave realized he'd been making generative art his whole life.

Back in Boston, learning photography, he'd had a project called Compositions. He'd walk the city and shoot pipes against brick, panels, infrastructure, geometric arrangements of the built environment. That was a system. Drip Drop is a system. Go to Times Square when it's pouring rain, let the neon billboards fill the puddles with color, set the shutter to freeze the droplets as they hit. Twenty thousand frames, curated to one thousand one hundred and eleven. DRIVErive is a system. Cars from the side, room on both sides of the frame, character in the vehicle, an interesting background. Ten years of accumulation, thousands of works. He's invited collectors to participate by submitting their own DRIVE-style images for token rewards, which is to say the system is now running outside of him.

The contradiction is that he doesn't live this way. "I'm a very chaotic, fly by the seat of my pants" person, he says, unscheduled, unstructured, chasing light and ideas without a calendar. The art is where the rules live. The art is where the chaos finds order. Photography becomes a generative practice the same way code is, except the rule-runner is a human walking the city long enough for the system to deliver the frame.

Dave's next project arrives June 16th with Transient Labs. He's keeping the details quiet for now. It's another systems-based effort, the result of a year of daily iteration since his last release.

He thinks a lot about pace. He could have done open editions during the speculation peaks and made millions in a day. Plenty did. Most of those artists, he points out, aren't here anymore. "I'd rather have a modest lifelong career than a flash in the pan extreme success," he says. The supply gets metered. The pacing gets protected. The community holds.

Dave shouts out his earliest collectors: @Vslav_eth, @redbeardnft, and @ZanzibarVenturz, who bought the first pieces he ever minted, film scans of New York shot on his grandfather's Hasselblad. @BTCB4U, the largest Drip Drop holder with over fifty pieces, who told him he'd always fallen into a trance watching puddles fill with light from sprinklers, and saw the project and recognized exactly what it was. And the team at 24 Hours of Art, particularly @rogerdickerman, whose dedication to telling these stories he considers as significant to the ecosystem as collecting itself.

Artists inspiring him lately: @SamSpratt, for what Dave calls social sculpting, treating community as a block of marble. And @egodead, whose relentless studio practice he describes as a calling rather than a choice.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @dave_krugman recommends @JNSilva_, the friend who first got him into onchain art, and @EfdotStudio, his neighbor and a photographer with a foot in both the traditional and onchain worlds, and @lesCogumelos, whose work he admires.