Summer Wagner is a photographer and film director based in Los Angeles. She grew up in Illinois, in the Rust Belt region of the Midwest, and her staged self-portraits blur memory and fantasy, casting the region's abandoned factories and the blue glow of screens as scenes of ritual and spiritual reflection.
Wagner picked up a camera in 2020 and began posting self-portraits on Instagram and X. A community of photographers she found there encouraged her to mint her work as NFTs. In October 2021 she released her genesis collection The In Between, twenty-four one-of-one photographs made that summer, on the platform Foundation. Trained in film production, she creates her images using long exposure techniques and color grading in Adobe Lightroom. She has named the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the photographer Gregory Crewdson as influences on the liminal, spiritual quality of her work. In winter 2022 she released Evolutions, her first editions series, on her own Manifold contract, consisting of seven photographs in 290 editions total. The series let collectors burn one edition to redeem another. Burning Sow redeemed The Reaping, and, near Beltane 2023, burning Krasis redeemed La Loba. In 2023 she released Hands of Umbra, four photographs of hands holding totems of earth, water, fire and air, each issued in 50 editions on the platform Proof.xyz. The collection was shown in Moonbirds' “Diamond Exhibition” alongside work by Terrell Jones and Sarah Ridgley. That year Wagner contributed her piece Chemical Baptism Two: Trance In Myrrh to Christie's New York Cartography of the Soul auction, which included other NFT artists such as Sam Spratt, Justin Aversano and Nadya Tolokonnikova.
