The Line hosts two photographic collections during FotoFest. One a collection photographed around New Zealand in 1973 and the second photographed from a single location in New Zealand during lockdown 2021, and each treats the blockchain as something other than a marketplace.
Geodetic Moments — MintFace
100 photographs · on-chain metadata · mintface.art/c/geodetic-moments
Geodetic Moments is a sequence of 100 photographs taken during New Zealand's 2020 lockdown from a single vantage point: the summit of Pukekura Hill in Hawke's Bay. The hill takes its permanence from the geodetic marker set at its peak... a triangulated survey point, one of the fixed references from which the wider landscape is measured.
During lockdown the marker took on a second role. With movement restricted, the walk to the summit became one of the few remaining perspectives available. The marker, designed to hold still while the world is measured around it... became a stand-in for absence: for the horizons that were briefly out of reach, for the fixed points that anchor a place when its normal life is suspended.
The collection's size, 100, borrows its provenance from Justin Aversano's Twin Flames, the 2021 work that established 100 as a conventional edition size for photographic collections minted on-chain. This lineage is deliberate. Geodetic Moments sits within a young but self-referencing tradition of cryptographic photography that has begun to develop its own canonical forms.
Where the collection extends beyond conventional practice is in its use of on-chain metadata. Each photograph carries data beyond the standard EXIF... traits, provenance signals, and artist-set variants that are readable both as art-historical apparatus and as material for the collection's own future exploration. The metadata is not adjacent to the work; it is part of the work's form. Viewed at The Line, the images function as photographs. Viewed on-chain, they function as records of the traits that produced them.
MintFace is present at The Line during FotoFest and will set up artists with their own wallets, both for collecting and for reaching collectors internationally.
Documentary Photographs, New Zealand 1973 — Leith Jennings
Archival mint · natlib.govt.nz record · not for sale
The second collection is by the late Leith Jennings — a series of documentary photographs of New Zealand made in 1973. The originals exhibited are noted by the Alexander Turnbull Library and remain publicly consultable. The work sits within a specific moment in New Zealand photographic practice: post-NZ Photography magazine.
The Line is minting the collection on-chain not for sale, but as a conservation effort — a distributed, verifiable record that sits alongside the physical archive rather than replacing it. There is a family link between the photographer and the gallery's founder with Leith Jennings being Ryan Jennings' father.
The two collections together
Geodetic Moments treats the blockchain as an artistic medium in its own right; a substrate whose properties (immutability, extensible metadata, provenance) are choices made with intent. The Jennings collection treats the blockchain as an archival substrate after the fact.
FotoFest runs at The Line, 318 Heretaunga Street West, Hastings. MintFace is on-site during the exhibition to answer questions about wallet setup and collecting.
