An absolute highlight is this exciting collection of 16 exceptional photographs compiled for the PHOTOPIA in Hamburg. 

Internationally renowned and award-winning top photographers have each donated one of their works to the fair's first NFT Drop Open Edition.

Visitors will be able to mine one randomly selected work each during the PHOTOPIA period from 13 to 16 October. 

All incidental costs will be covered at PHOTOPIA. This means that new digital art collectors will receive a work of art by an internationally renowned artist free of charge. 

The aim of the campaign is to make NFT technology better known and accessible to photographers and photo enthusiasts alike.

In this way, PHOTOPIA Hamburg makes it easier for art enthusiasts to enter the digital art world.In so doing, the fair also becomes a pioneer internationally, as it directly brings visitors and artists together on the Web3.

Photopia

Christian Popkes 

 Born in 1965 in Germany. His career aspiration was clear from childhood onwards: photographer. For his studies, he moved to the north and studied in Dortmund and Bielefeld. Since then he has been living in Hamburg as an independent photographer, book author, artistic director, curator and networker and works for advertising agencies and publishing houses, among others. He describes himself as a photographing picture person. In addition to numerous works for various magazines and well-known companies, his focus is on people and their souls. Popkes has produced several very successful calendars about his favourite city, New York. He has received various awards throughout his career. In addition to his practical photography work, Christian Popkes is the founder of the Fototrns, a photo tour on a barge through the port of Hamburg. He is also the artistic director of the photography fair PHOTOPIA Hamburg, 13 - 16 October 2022.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #218

Helmut Grill 

 Born 1965 in Austria. Wholesale trader, repro photographer, lithographer and photo manipulator - and artist since 1991. As a freelance artist, he has been experimenting with a wide variety of materials in his studio for over 25 years and in this way creates extraordinary sculptures that astonish. In his photographic works, he takes this idea further and combines different image snippets and objects to create new image worlds. These digital alterations give rise to photomontages that are sometimes consciously recognisable as such, in other cases leaving the viewer in doubt. In any case, they are thought-provoking, disturbing or provocative. In his newly created, sometimes paradoxical realities, Grill takes aim at the firmly rooted belief in what we see in his own way. His works can be seen in numerous international exhibitions as well as at festivals and art fairs.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #220

PHOTOPIA 2022 #221

Rainer Hosch 

 For over three decades, Rainer Hosch, aka The Man with the Camera, has captured the faces of luminaries in entertainment, music, fashion, business, athletics, and art. He maintains a fine art photography practice exploring street reportage, beachscapes, and ring flash portraits. His client work has appeared across international publications and campaigns including The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times Magazine, LUomo Vogue, Esquire, Red Bull, Nike, Sony, and Nespresso. In 2022 Hosch created his Genesis NFT collection titled 52icons, dedicated to his late father, Heinz, a renowned photojournalist. A vanguard in celebrity portraiture, Hosch presents 52 iconic faces including Iggy Pop, George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Alba, Lenny Kravitz, Taylor Swift, Whoopi Goldberg, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg and Roger Federer to name a few.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #222

Thomas Phler 

 Born 1966 in Germany. Photographer, photo podcaster and digital artist with intermittend nerdy tendencies. Early on, Phler was fascinated by the possibilities of cutting out parts of paper prints and stitching them together. This way he was able to extend his only 50mm lens to take wide-angle shots. With the digital possibilities, he began 360 photography. These shots are basically a sphere with the viewer in the centre. They are characterised by the fact that, especially with VR glasses, one experiences a scene very close to reality and authenticity. For his digital art these basic equirectangular shots are projected into a different representation. The intended image effect is largely determined by the camera position. The tripod's location is important, but also the camera height is crucial - this may be close to the ground, at eye level, on a 3 meters high tripod or even higher. The final result becomes visible not before extensive, time consuming post-processing. Hence it takes some experience to anticipate where the appropriate camera position has to be. His image in the photopia collection was part of his exhibition at Europe's largest outdoor photo festival Festival La Gacilly Baden Photo, where he exhibited in 2022 among others such as Nick Brandt and Ragnar Axelsson.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #223

Stephan Gabriel 

 Born 1953 in Germany. Advertising salesman, photographer, head of photography at the daily newspaper Die Welt in Bonn and narrator for audio books etc.. The Hamburg native established a reputation in journalism with well-founded travel reports. Picture books about the Danish Baltic Sea island Bornholm and Sdschweden  Eine Reise durch den Gta-Kanal. Books and calendar productions about Paris including for the airline Air France are examples. In countless photographs taken over decades in Paris, Stephan Gabriel documents his love for the French metropolis with his very personal view. Fascinated by the diversity of this extraordinary metropolis, his wonderful pictures portray the city on the Seine with a lot of heart and understanding. His works can also be found in various exhibitions in Cologne, Munich, Hamburg and Paris as well as with numerous publications in newspapers and magazines.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #225

Andr Wagner 

 Born 1980 in Germany. Trained photographer, member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Photographie (DGPh), concept creator, India fan. For the last 20 years he has been building bridges between reality and spirituality with his fascinating photographs as a freelance photo artist in Berlin. In each of his works he tells a unique story to make thoughts and feelings visible in artistic photography. His mostly digitally non-manipulated images are only secondarily documenting. Rather, they capture a moment in the infinity of time that has fascinated him since his youth. In ordinary and exotic places and in very special situations, Wagner seeks answers to the spiritual questions of immortality and the meaning of time with technically brilliantly staged (mostly) long-term photographs. In addition to various book publications and international exhibitions, his works are highly regarded in renowned museums and collections.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #226

PHOTOPIA 2022 #227

PHOTOPIA 2022 #229

Jan von Holleben 

 Born in 1977 in southern Germany, Jan von Holleben lived most of his youth in an alternative commune and identifies a strong connection between the development of his photographic work and the influence of his parents, a cinematographer and child therapist. At the age of thirteen, he was picking up a camera and experimenting with all sorts of magical tricks, developing his photographic imagination and skills. After pursuing studies in teaching children with disabilities, he moved to London, earned a degree in the Theory and History of Photography at Surrey Institute of Art and Design and became submerged within the London photographic scene. He quickly set up two photographic collectives, Young Photographers United and Photodebut, followed more recently by the Photographers Office and the publishing house Tarzipan. His body of photographic work focusing on the homo ludens  the man who learns through play  is itself built from a playful integration of pedagogical theory with his own personal experiences of play and memories of childhood. Von Hollebens idiosyncratic images have become part of the contemporary German photographic imagination. Shifting between fine art and editorial projects, Holleben is known as much for his collaborations with the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, London and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin as for his editorial work for Spiegel, Zeit, DU Magazin, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Geo, and Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his ad campaigns for the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (to name only a few). His books have been published in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and North America and are translated into seventeen languages.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #234

PHOTOPIA 2022 #236

Frank Herfort 

 Born 1979 in Germany. Architectural, documentary and industrial photographer. Lived in Moscow, Russia for more than a decade. In addition to work for international companies and corporations as well as a number of renowned agencies, his books are particularly worth mentioning. Imperial Pomp (2013), Russian Fairytales (2020) and most notably CCCP Underground (2022). With his unique eagle eye, Herfort photographed more than 770 metro stations in 19 cities in 7 former Soviet countries. The result is a gigantic archive of a world in which time seems to have stood still. His photographs of the wondrously surreal post-Soviet world are fascinating, cool and thought-provoking, but above all they are strikingly human. He publishes regularly in international magazines. In recent years he has won several photography awards. Currently working in advertising, architecture, editorial and corporate photography.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #237

PHOTOPIA 2022 #238

Caroline Heinecke 

 Born in 1986 in Nordhausen in Thuringia in the Harz region, lives, and works in Berlin. She studied visual communication at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau. In 2017, she decided to express her flair for compositions of colors, shapes and arrangements through another medium  photography. Heinecke studied at the Ostkreuzschule fur Fotografie in Berlin from 2017-2020. She is passionate about still life and fine art photography. The patient objects are often supporting actors until the photographer lets us look through their eyes. The reality reflected in her photographs appears slightly enraptured, two-dimensional, as it were centered and alive in its motionlessness. Starting from staged things and situations, she creates a visual world that deals with themes such as niche societies, identity, and the future. In addition to various group exhibitions such as 2022 at Les Rencontres de la Photographie dArles or Copenhagen Photo Festival (2020), LUMIX Festival (2020), she can look back on a number of publications, including in the photo magazines Der Greif, Photonews and Stern Magazine.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #239

Heiko Hellwig 

 Born in 1960 in Germany. He discovered the magic of photography at the age of six. As a freelance photographer and photo artist in Stuttgart, he worked for large companies and corporations for many years. His intense observation of reality shows in a brilliant way: Photos can reveal much more. Because for the attentive viewer there is always a layer or level visible behind, above or beside it. Layers that he makes visible and tangible in his works today through various photographic techniques. This more visibility is not always just beautiful, but always exciting. In his works, many of which are also critical of the times, he seeks to penetrate the surfaces of the real world and invite the viewer to reflect, almost forcing him to do so. Hellwig's works are exhibited nationally and internationally and can be found in various private collections. Many of his photographs have been awarded several awards.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #240

Katerina Belkina 

 Born in 1974 in Russia. She already grew up in an artistic atmosphere. Her mother was an artist herself. In Samara, Katerina Belkina was educated at the Academy of Arts Petrov-Vodkin, which she finished with a diploma in 1993. Later, she deepened her education in photography at the photography school of Michael Musorin from 2000 to 2002. Belkina has since shown her mysterious, painted photographs in numerous exhibitions internationally. In her works, she tells stories, often of her own experience, and does so in her very special style. In 2007, she was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in Moscow (Russian equivalent of the Turner Prize). In 2015, the artist was awarded the International Lucas Cranach Prize. The prestigious Hasselblad Masters Award was presented to her in 2016. Katerina Belkina lives and works in Werder (Havel) near Berlin.

PHOTOPIA 2022 #241

Jan C. Schlegel 

 Born in 1965 in Germany. He discovered his passion for photography at the age of 14 during a photography course at school. Schlegel soon began to solidify his preference for black-and-white portraits. With them, he not only creates artistic photographs, but also documents and preserves unique works of art - the people themselves.  None of the people photographed wears special make-up or was specially dressed before the picture was taken. Nothing was staged, nothing is faked. The only stylistic device he uses for each of his photographs is a simple grey background. This draws attention to the people, not to their circumstances. The basic message is the inner and outer beauty of the people depicted. Schlegel emphasises their uniqueness, their value and their irretrievability. With his award-winning art, he champions the specialness and individuality of cultures.