Roman Drits (b. 1986) is a photographer born in Riga, Latvia, who lives and works between Riga and Hamburg, Germany.Working since 2005 across atmospheric, street, documentary, and personal photography, he favors analog techniques for the texture and authenticity they bring, prioritizing emotional resonance over technical precision.
His series Auftakt takes its name from a musical term that, in his words, “describes the feeling of something yet to come”. Music has run through his life as well as his photography: he has played piano since childhood, produced electronic music, and studied academic composition. He later married a concert pianist and photographs musicians commercially, with some of his images used as album covers.
In 2011 he created Webcam Portraits, photographing strangers directly from his computer screen during online video chats, embracing the low-resolution, pixelated aesthetic of the format rather than conventional standards of photographic quality. The series was exhibited the same year at the Kaunas Photo Festival and later published in outlets including The New York Review of Books, Der Greif, and FK Magazine. A decade later, in 2021, he revisited the images with early generative adversarial networks, layering AI over the originals to create Webgan Portraits, released as limited-edition Tezos NFTs on Hic Et Nunc.He has said he was drawn to NFTs and blockchain by an interest in giving his analog work a digital life, and by the ideals of decentralization.
In 2022 he began Analog, Digital, Imagined, layering collage, overpainting, and digital intervention onto analog photography to explore memory, dreams, and the ephemeral.His work has been shown at institutions including Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, the Barbican Arts Group Trust in London, and in group exhibitions at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Oculus in New York.
