Noe Alonzo, who works under the name Noealz, is an urban photographer from Texas who has lived in Seoul, South Korea since 2011. He moved to Seoul as an English teacher and continued to teach there, but photography became his focus. He photographs the cityscapes of Korea in a vivid, anime-like color palette that has drawn attention from the Seoul Museum of Art, National Geographic, and BBC Storyworks.
Since working with NFTs, Alonzo has developed a style he calls lightly animated photography, adding subtle motion to still images rather than full animation. He credits NFTs with pushing him to learn new techniques, though he does not consider himself the inventor of the style, pointing to the older tradition of cinemagraphs as a precedent. He has also made collaborative pieces with photographers he calls peers, including Digital Soju by Noealz x Ruben Fro with Ruben Fro and Gangnam Luv by Noealz x Tokyoluv with Tokyoluv, projects that sometimes took more than two years to finish because of the collaborators' differing schedules.
In November 2023 he minted Ode to the Buidlers as card 161 of The Memes by 6529. For the piece he used photogrammetry, scanning a street installation of printed profile pictures belonging to web3 builders in the Euljiro metal-shop district of Seoul, then converting the scans into a 3D point cloud that he rendered, lit, and edited. He also recorded the sound of metal workers building components nearby, using it as an audio layer that ties the piece's theme of building to the district itself.In December 2023 he released MomentsAsia365 through Nifty Gateway's NG Curated, a project years in development in which a single photograph updates daily for a year before a final image on the 366th day.
