This ticket guarantees the holder 1/6th of the First Film archive: 732 film strips as 1/1s divided into 6 randomized batches of 122 film strips. This is the entirety of existing film shot by photographer Aaron Huey from 1998-2000, every frame from start to finish, of his journey into Svanetia, a secluded mountain region in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia.
"This journey was the first time I fell in love with a people and a place this deeply, and it forever changed how I made pictures. In this film, I began as a backpacker with a handful of slide film and no vision for storytelling, but over the course of 107 rolls, taken in three journeys over three years, I learned to see. The result was my first photo story, and one that would lead to my career as a National Geographic photographer. These film strips are every blurry frame and boring thought and hesitation of that journey, but also every risk and breakthrough and reward that made me the photographer I am today."
In addition to the 122 film strips in each batch will be 5 special select 1/1 images that each correspond to a frame on one of the strips in the batch. In the archive there were 12 blank strips, 2 of these will be in each batch and each will come with a 1/1 image scan of a page from journals, songs, maps, and vocabulary handwritten between 1998-2000.
