NFTs
Iconic French magazine Paris Match auctions historic photos via Ethereum NFTs
Paris Match, a French magazine known worldwide for its photojournalism, announced on Monday that it will auction a series of archival photos as NFTs to celebrate the publication’s 75th anniversary.
The auction, which begins today, will feature 75 Ethereum NFTs of iconic photos from the Paris Match archives. The digital files will also come with signed and numbered physical prints of the same images. Starting bids for each photo will start at 0.3 ETH, an amount worth about $1,062 in the writing.
The Paris Match photos selected for today’s sale include those featuring cultural icons such as The Rolling Stones, Jack Nicholson, Orson Welles and John Travolta, as well as reports on the Berlin Wall, Harlem and the Tour de France.
“John Travolta chez lui aux Etats-Unis”, 1980. Credit: Jean-Claude Sauer, Paris Match Archives
For the auction, Paris Match partnered with NFT photography platform Focus Block It is Super rare, the NFT market. Today’s sale marks the magazine’s second foray into NFTs, following a sale of 120 units in January 2023.
Emmanuel Daien, founder of Focus Bloc, also helped Paris Match with the magazine’s first NFT sale last year. He said DecryptSCENE that during the initial sale, he observed an interesting mix of traditional photo collectors and crypto-native NFT enthusiasts vying for their own pieces of the magazine’s history.
“Rendez-vous avec Jack Nicholson a Paris”, 1974. Credit: Jack Garofalo, Paris Match Archives
This time, Daien said, the magazine opted for an auction format rather than a fixed-price sale. It also introduced a physical element to NFTs, with prints accompanying the digital files – perhaps a reference to the expected success of the sale among traditional photo collectors.
Owners of Paris Match NFTs will receive full digital licensing rights for the photos they own. Paris Match will retain all other rights associated with the images.
Edited by Andrew Hayward