STREET DREAMS X COLORS OPENS TONES OF NYC IN BROOKLYN

Street Dreams Magazine and Colors x Studios are showing Tones of NYC, a ten photographer group exhibition, at 61 Jefferson Street in Brooklyn from July 7 through July 9. It is the first time the Berlin founded music platform has put its name behind a photography show instead of a song.

The pairing is the story. Colors built a following of more than a million people on the promise of one artist, one colored wall, no audience, no set. Street Dreams built its own following on the opposite premise, ten photographers loose in a city with cameras. Putting the two names on the same flyer is a bet that the audience for both is the same audience, and this week it gets tested in Bushwick.

July 7 to 9. Ten Photographers. One Loft on Jefferson Street.

Tones of NYC is the tenth edition of Street Dreams' recurring 10x10 format, subtitled A Love Letter to NYC for this run. The show is open daily from 12pm to 4pm at 61 Jefferson Street, with entry by RSVP through the Street Dreams Instagram bio. There is no ticket price listed, and the run is short by design, three days and out, which is the same scarcity logic Colors uses when it drops a new artist session with no warning and lets the internet find it.

Steven Irby Put Himself in the Lineup

Steven Irby, who goes by stevesweatpants, is one of the ten photographers shooting the show he co founded. Irby started Street Dreams in 2014 with Eric Veloso and Michael Cobarrubia as an Instagram hashtag before it became a quarterly print magazine sold at the New York Public Library and Reed Space, per The Hundreds. The hashtag has been used more than three million times since launch. The rest of the lineup is Kristen White, Pierre, Flordalis, 1st, JN Silva, Dave Krugman, EW Photos, itscampos and Jive, a spread that mixes street portraiture with documentary work rather than a single house style.

Street Dreams has done this expansion before. In 2015 the magazine partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival, part of a run of gallery events, panel discussions and photo meets that turned a hashtag into an events calendar. Wildflower Studios ran a similar play in May when Rare Shades 7 put more than a hundred Porsches inside Robert De Niro's Astoria soundstages for NYCxDESIGN, proof that New York's creative campuses are stacking short run, RSVP only events on top of each other this summer.

Colors Built Its Name on One Colored Wall

Colors x Studios was founded in Berlin in 2016 by Philipp Starcke and Felix Glasmeyer and built its reputation on A Colors Show, a format that films one artist performing against one saturated color background with nothing else in frame. That format is now a Wikipedia entry and a launchpad platform artists compete to get booked on. Backing a Brooklyn photo show with no music component at all is a departure, and it says Colors thinks its audience shows up for a visual language, not just a genre of song.

The overlap is real even if the mediums are not. Photography subcultures on Instagram move the same way music discovery does now, hashtag first, gallery second, brand deal third. ABELA023's second lookbook turned a Paris pop up into a two week destination using the same logic, physical space as proof of concept before the internet decides if it travels.

Nobody Has Confirmed a Second City

The counter here is obvious. A three day RSVP show at one Brooklyn address is not a national rollout, and neither Street Dreams nor Colors has confirmed whether Tones of NYC becomes a recurring joint booking or a one off. Nothing in the caption promises a second city.

Read it as early rather than proven. Street Dreams already has the print run, the NYPL shelf placement and a decade of gallery experience to fill a room. Colors already has the million plus followers who show up for anything with its name on it. Neither side needed the other to draw a crowd, which is exactly why the collaboration is worth watching. When two platforms with separate three million and one million follower bases stop needing each other and do it anyway, that is a bet on a bigger room, not a bigger check.