Mark 'The Cobrasnake' Hunter

CAMERAS READY, PREPARE TO FLASH!


It’s there, for your immediate friends - no, the world to see. Your eyes fluttering even in the frozen still-motion of a captured image; drink hanging lazily by your side like a faithful puppy and cigarette pasted to the corner of your mouth but perilously close to succumbing to gravity’s inevitable conclusion. It’s not necessarily how you remember (?) your night but thanks to some scurrilous camera jockey and their photo blog it’s how it will go down in history. Elsewhere on the page everyone else perfectly epitomizes your imagined hipness.

Party photo blogging is rife. Used to be you could almost get away with anything on a night out with only the bleary memories of your cohorts to remind you of your 4am follies or 5 o’clock inspired awesomeness. The digital age of mega pixilated documentation has ended that, but thankfully scant few snap shot takers plow the depths of paparazzo-like vileness. Most involved in photo blogging highlight the painfully cool clientele of a club or night, making you wish you were there, making you wish you were them. Kids practice their poses, their non-poses, their I-wish-you’d-hurry-the-fuck-up-and-let-me-get-on-with-being-coolness. Few shy away from the lens, for it is instant, if fleeting, celebrity. The photographers themselves attract their own attention, becoming minor celebrities in their own peer circle, courted by clubs and party promoters to immortalize their nights. But few have reached the level of success that is being bestowed upon Mark Hunter, a young 22 year old photographer from LA who enviably calls himself the Cobrasnake.
If you haven’t heard of the Cobrasnake chances are you’ve heard about his one time girlfriend Cory Kennedy, an even younger 17 year old who has inexplicably become an international style icon after first appearing on the Cobrasnake party pages.
Though talking to Hunter as he slowly rouses from another intense day of shooting, networking and maintaining his incredibly popular website from fashion week in New York, it’s hard to picture that this short hairy Jewish kid is such hot property right now. Truth be told, he sounds like a cross between Arnold Horshack and Screech, his larynx inflamed by being around too many cigarettes and talking to be heard over the din of nightly parties. But nevertheless that croaky, pitched up voice is full of genuine humility as he recounts his early beginnings: “back in 2003 I was assisting and interning for the artist Sheperd Fairey and being around him I was invited to lots of cool art shows, parties, concerts. I was just out of high school and I would bring my camera to all these events. I was taking photos of all of these nights and this was at a stage when not everyone was doing that. All these people would say to me that they hadn’t brought their cameras out and would I email them some photos. I would take the time to personally email everybody a selection of the best photos from the night and I got kind of lazy after a while and decided to post them on a website.”
Hunter’s self-professed laziness paid off because with that move he created an online portal for his work and it wasn’t long before that portal reached out far beyond the communities it was documenting. It was his photos of a private Yeah Yeah Yeah’s show that set the wheels in motion for him. A lot of the photos he posted got used on the band’s website and fan sites, which lead people back to look at more Cobrasnake photos. Being linked to Fairey obviously had its advantages too, and with Hunter at the right parties and keeping the right company it wasn’t long before his name was popping up in the LA papers as a young one to watch.
Wanting a physical presence outside of turning up to parties to take photos, Hunter took some marketing tips from Fairey and started producing a range of stickers. The Obey artist actually helped Hunter out by putting his first run of stickers in to one of his batches, and all of a sudden the young snake was side-winding off in another direction.
He markets his stickers in packs, reportedly making thousands of them at a time, and more recently has started producing a limited monthly tee shirt in conjunction with Californian company RVCA, which ends up on hip kids from Brooklyn to Brussels.
“When I make the stickers and tee shirts it’s a direct source of income but it’s also a really powerful marketing tool. When there’re kids all around the world with my face on a shirt or a little girl wearing the cobra snake tee it’s building the brand and building the energy because those kids will wear them to parties and party promoters will ask what they are, so it’s a very good word of mouth tool. That way people who don’t know about me will then know and maybe will get me to travel to those outer regions and take photos.”
When Hunter talks about marketing and the business side of what he does you realize that there is no mistake about him being pegged as one of the cool breed, for unlike Cory Kennedy and other ‘It’ girls he isn’t there because he’s pretty or dresses well. He has an innate sense of what will drive his brand and that goes right down to his reptilian moniker.
“By the time I came up with the website URL, the cobrasnake.com it was pretty well thought out. A lot of photographers have their name dash photography as their URL, like markhunter-photography.com and it just seems a bit pretentious and a bit egocentric. So for me I came up with that name to make it sound like it wasn’t just one person. So I’ll get people asking sometimes how many people are working for me because with the name it doesn’t appear to all be the work of one person. In that sense the Cobra Snake becomes this definitive sort of folk lore that travels to all these different countries and comes back with photos.”
To that end the snake has been slithering all over South America, touching down in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, further south down to Australia, Japan, Paris and all over the States. He is sought after by party promoters to somehow authenticate their parties with his documentation of the night, to help create the vibe, not unlike securing a big name DJ for the event. Hunter tells me that he sees what he does as very much like being a DJ in the sense that when he enters a party people start to loosen up and play up for the camera, injecting an energy into the party with his presence. It may sound slightly narcissistic but looking at his photography you can’t deny it.
There are others though who have plenty else to say about Hunter and it’s not all good. The blogosphere is littered with haters who decry Hunter for his relationship with Kennedy, his style of photography and his status as a small time celebrity when he’s just the guy taking the photos. It is something that Hunter is used to and shrugs it off for the shallow jealousy that it is.
“You know you don’t have to like my photographs but you can’t really deny the fact that I’m consistent. I mean I’m posting usually 100 images a night on a very consistent and regular basis so looking back on nearly three to four years of doing this and just the fact that I’ve kept it up that long, you can’t really criticise that. Personally I happen to really like the photos that I take. Shepherd and I talked about that in the early stages, the people hating on me. He said ‘look at what they’re doing; they’re sitting at home writing nasty emails. They don’t have anything else going on’. So if you want to step up and dis’ me at least be able to back it up in some way.”
Those haters generally have a lot to be jealous about. Whether it’s the number of hits he gets on his website (over 30,000 unique visitors a day), the company he keeps (Cory Kennedy, Steve Aoki, Jeremy Scott) or the people he collaborates with (Aoki again, So-Me, the director of Justice’s incredible D.A.N.C.E. video). It is through hanging out with Aoki and people like him that Hunter says he remains inspired to keep pushing himself, channeling his slightly A.D.D. personality into the creative arts.
“I like to surround myself with cool people and Steve is a great example. We’ve done a lot of traveling together and he’s always on the same page as me with music and fashion and stuff. Having people like him and Cory Kennedy, Jeremy Scott, all these influencers of culture and myself, we’re like this really cool sort of collective, loose collective and it’s a sort of international collective where I’ll go and hang out with the Ed Banger guys and Justice and Collette, and then go to Australia and hang out with Ksubi and Monster Children. You know it’s wherever you go there is always a little scene and you just feel at home wherever you travel.”
Most recently Hunter has collaborated with Aoki on his latest mix album release, Pillowface and his Airplane Chronicles, designing an actual pillow with their faces on alternate sides. This explains Hunter is to just get some “silly stuff” out there, which falls in line with his inane tee shirt designs too. Other collaborations and commercial work includes campaigns for a number of clothing companies, T Mobile and Yahoo with talks in the pipeline for deals with Adidas among others.
If this all sounds like a lot of work for one person then you’re right. Despite the illusion of Cobrasnake folklore, Hunter works day and night to maintain his site and stay on top of the coolest parties and events. It may look like he’s leading a sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle but it would be more accurate to say he’s just an observer.
“It’s not as glamorous as it seems,” confirms a hoarse Hunter. “You know I’m not a big drinker, I don’t really do any drugs so I’m a bit boring when it comes to that so it’s really funny when people meet me for the first time and they offer me some cocaine or they offer to buy me a shots and stuff and I’m always turning them down. Hopefully I’m not letting them down to much by not being the party animal that I may seem to be. But you can’t party every night and maintain a website and be professional, it’s just not possible. It’s hard enough without drugs and alcohol. I update the site every night after parties. Last night I was out to 4-4:30 in the morning and then another hour or so working on the site before I go to sleep and then I’m up at like ten the next morning, going out, taking meetings and figuring out what I’m going to shoot. There’s an illusion that it’s all fun and games but there’s a lot more that goes in to it.”
However there are certainly no complaints from the young photographer. Even though he confesses he’s not much of a fashion follower, the shear energy of being at New York fashion week has him on a natural high regardless of the long days and longer nights.
“One of the reasons I started doing this in the first place was because it’s so interesting and when you have something like Fashion Week where it brings together all these artists and musicians and socialites it creates a very interesting mix and then you have these parties where all these people are and a band will play. So in this case music and fashion becomes this really exciting unifier and brings all these people together and makes for really exciting things to happen.”
It’s a statement like this that allows you to get a glimpse of Hunter, the awe-struck kid living his dream. There isn’t a hint of pretension in his description of anything he does, who he hangs out with or the attention that is lavished upon him by party-goers. For all the shots he takes at parties there are plenty of others taken of Hunter, and in almost every one he is hard at work snapping away rather than leaning against the wall, hitting on one of the countless gorgeous women who proliferate his site. Though his attraction to the opposite sex is one that Hunter cannot deny as a driving force for getting him interested in party photography in the first place.
”You look at Terry Richardson, just guys with cameras in general, all those classic photographers taking photos at parties in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s like you’re just boosting people’s egos and women especially like that. But at the same time I’ve got to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised when girls who I never thought would ever even talk to me come to talk to me to flirt and be silly. Sometimes I’ll see an amazing looking girl who I’d love to take photos of but I feel really nervous, but she might come up and ask me to take some photos, so that’s cool. Now there is a huge trend in the States - and I think everywhere else where people are taking photos at parties and blogging them, but I think there is really only a small percentage of them who are excited about photography and the others just do it to pick up girls and stuff.”
It is interesting to hear Hunter acknowledge the existence of those before him, the party photographers of the 70’s and early 80’s, people like Allan Tannenbaum and Bobby Miller who diarized the glamour and hedonistic decadence of New York nightlife in a pre-aids world. Hunter wasn’t even born at this time, and although his photos may seem tamer in comparison to the eye-popping goings on of places like Studio 54, they are stylistically of the same lineage and quality. Perhaps in defiance of those uninhibited images of American nightlife in full sexual revolution or perhaps just because of good parenting he spurns shots of racy behaviour in favour of something more quirky or fun.
“There’re always the attention camera-whores at parties and a lot of girls will want to make out with other girls for photos and that’s not really my style. Not that I’m like a feminist or anything but it just seems kind of tacky. I wouldn’t want my girlfriend making out with other girls. So I’ll tell them I’m not going to take their photo and then take a photo of them being confused about why I won’t take a photo of them making out.”
For this 22 year old, making a career out of his passions and finding the hardest decisions he has to make whether he goes to New York or Tokyo or Paris on a given weekend to do his job, he is finding himself the subject of more and more photos and articles but remains humble about what he does.
“It’s funny, you know I never expected that people would ever want to ask me things or put attention on me and now just in the past year I’ve been all over the world from Australia to Japan to South America and I can literally be walking down the street in a kind of hip area and pretty much every time somebody will come up to me and be like, ‘oh my god you’re the Cobrasnake, I’m so excited you’re here’. But the thing is I’m probably more excited to be there myself than they even realize. I think I’m very lucky.”