Drift is the professional name of the photographer Isaac Wright, known for climbing skyscrapers and bridges to shoot drone-assisted, high-altitude images.His project Where My Vans Go, an NFT photography collection, shows him wearing a pair of Vans sneakers in vertiginous scenes atop skyscrapers and bridges.A former U.S. Army paratrooper and later chaplain, Wright began photographing his climbs in 2018 as a way to cope with depression and PTSD.,
In December 2020 Wright was arrested and jailed for four months without bond after illegally climbing three structures in Cincinnati.,After his release in 2021, Wright's photography began selling as NFTs.In April 2022 he sold the open edition First Day Out for 10,351 units at 0.2 ETH each, totaling $6.8 million. He donated $1 million of the proceeds to the Bail Project, a nonprofit that pays bail for incarcerated Americans who cannot afford it.
In May 2025 Wright held “Coming Home”, his first solo gallery exhibition, at Robert Mann Gallery in Chelsea, New York.,NYPD officers arrested him at the opening in front of about 400 gallerygoers and charged him with third-degree criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor. Wright believed the charge was triggered by his photograph Empire State of Mind, taken atop the Empire State Building. The charges were dropped five months later after he completed court-ordered therapy.
Reviewing the show for The Brooklyn Rail, critic Lyle Rexer situated the photographs in a romantic tradition of vertiginous, first-person image-making. He suggested that the art world would likely regard Wright's manipulation of a drone from a tower perch as a work of performance art, likening him to Chris Burden. Wright has said his work aims “to discover extraordinary states of being and bring them to people, so that we can look beyond the systems of control that determine so much of our lives”.
