This is Sunny Crittenden's 44th archived webcam photo, created October 23rd, 2001 and instantly uploaded to StileProjectDotCom's Portal 9 webcam portal, arguably the first of its kind. Portal 9 became CamwhoresDotCom, a members only webcam portal, in 2002. This photo was gifted to Sunny, along with the rest of her cam photo archive, by Kevin Day, the webmaster of Camwhores, on March 18th, 2015 when the site officially closed.

The photo's caption reads, "School sucks...but Blake rocks my socks :o)" Sunny was in college for advertising at the time (and miserable) and she had just met Blake, her soon-to-be boyfriend and would-be husband. He lived in Militiagan, USA and Sunny lived in Ontario, Canada, so much of their courtship was online and Sunny did a lot of flirting with him through her webcam captions. The extra characters at the end of the sentence represent a sideways smiley face with a nose, called an emoticon, in the age before emojis.

This photo is a nostalgic piece of internet history for fans of camgirls, the E/N scene, and the early 2000s internet in general, just as this NFT itself will be of the early 2020s Web.30. It is a 320x240px, 96 dpi jpeg taken with a Logitech webcam instantly and uploaded instantly to a public audience of thousands, much like a Polaroid, only digital and one step further due to its wider reach.

With this in mind, it is not necessarily unreasonable that a comparison could be made between Sunny's early experiments in instant digital photography and Robert Mapplethorpe's early Polaroids, as a lot of both artists' subject matter revolved around sex, sexuality, exhibitionism, naturism, and simply beauty itself. At the same time, both artists' early instant photography work appears amateurish and lowbrow/low tech by today's standards in their industries, which is part of their charm and appeal, and why they trigger nostalgia in certain people of those times.

Mapplethorpe's Polaroids were packaged and sold by galleries for a tidy sum of money to collectors when he was alive and they have appreciated in value as objects of art ever since. He ultimately enjoyed a very lavish lifestyle if the historians are to be believed and left behind a lot of money when he died.

Despite being physically small, due to the nature of Mapplethorpe's Polaroids' being film photographs, high resolution scans were taken and the collection was compiled into a really great book called "Polaroids" with only Mapplethorpe credited on the cover, despite the essay inside, written by someone else, being part of what makes it so great. His art was able to live on and reach a wider audience - the common person - that way. Higher resolutions of Sunny's instant digital webcam photos aren't possible due to the limitations of the technology at the time they were created, so they are best viewed on screens and handheld devices, as they were originally intended, making NFTs perfect for their preservation and continued provenance.

For more information on Sunny, please visit her website.